Stories from Slatehttp://www.slate.com/all.fulltext.beverly_gage.rss
Stories from SlateShould You Care About the Fate of Unions?http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2014/06/supreme_court_harris_decision_if_you_care_about_income_inequality_you_should.html
<p>Most commentary on the Supreme Court’s <em>Harris </em>decision has emphasized the ruling’s limited nature: While public-sector unions can no longer collect certain administrative fees, the decision could have been much broader, and much more damaging to organized labor.</p>
<p>But there is another, more important decision that still needs to be made when it comes to unions, and this one will happen mostly outside of the courts. Unless something dramatic changes, Americans are on the verge of living in a nation where the right to organize and to belong to a labor union no longer exists. The country will need to decide, sooner rather than later, if those rights are worth preserving.</p>
<p>At the moment, fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions, and that number continues to shrink. (In the public sector, numbers are somewhat higher, but unlikely to grow.) This is approximately the same percentage of workers who belonged to private-sector unions at the turn of the last century, at the height of the Gilded Age.</p>
<p>Not coincidentally, both eras also witnessed soaring inequality, with the top corporate earners absorbing ever-increasing shares of the nation’s wealth. Economists point to many factors to explain this circumstance, from globalization to changes in regulatory infrastructure. From the perspective of a political historian, though, there is also a simpler story to tell. Unions have long played a key role in constraining inequality, and in giving the working and middle classes a counterweight to the outsize political influence of the 1 percent. Historically speaking, the fate of organized labor and the fate of the American dream have gone hand in hand.</p>
<p>There were glimmers of union organizing even before the Civil War, but the modern labor movement began in earnest in the 1870s, with the rise of mass industry and large corporations. From there, it took more than 60 years to win federal recognition of the right to organize. The turning point came in 1935 with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (better known as the Wagner Act), the law that still governs most organizing efforts in the United States today. Union membership peaked in the mid-1950s at about 35 percent of private-sector workers, and has been falling ever since.</p>
<p>It is no coincidence that the labor movement’s glory days also yielded the building blocks of the social welfare state, including Social Security and overtime laws. There were many reasons for these developments, including Cold War image pressure: If you wanted to compete with the Soviets as the world’s model society, it was unseemly to concentrate too much wealth at the top. But unions played a key role in pushing for these changes at a national level, as well as securing wages that helped to even out the divide between executives and their employees. The middle decades of the 20<sup>th</sup> century are the only time in modern American history when inequality actually decreased, and Americans began to play more and work less. You’ve probably seen the union bumper stickers: “From the folks who brought you the weekend.” That slogan reflects a basic historical truth.</p>
<p>Public-sector unions had their own brief heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, when teachers and government clerks and air traffic controllers made a push for recognition. That momentum came to an abrupt halt in 1981, when Ronald Reagan fired the entire membership of the striking PATCO union. In the decades since, despite periodic bursts of organizing success, public-sector unions have barely held their own, while private-sector numbers have continued to plummet. All the same, according to the latest Pew Research Center poll, a majority of Americans continue to hold a favorable view of unions, and to see them as important protections for the working class.</p>
<p>Today, as labor historian Joseph McCartin has pointed out, the few unions that remain have all but given up on what was once their most potent weapon: the right to strike. In 1952, a fairly typical year in labor’s heyday, more than 2 million workers went out on strike. By 2002, just 46,000 workers engaged in that kind of action, and the numbers have fallen still further since. In 2009, the worst year of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, just 13,000 workers went on strike, in only five separate work stoppages. There was no shortage of economic complaint or suffering, just a shortage of organized action.</p>
<p>For consumers, this might be seen as a welcome development: The trains keep running, the schools stay open, the mail gets delivered. For anyone who cares about inequality, however, the near disappearance of American unions—even of strikes—should be cause for concern. At the moment, we seem to be awash in well-intentioned and even visionary policy proposals to stem the tide of inequality, from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/067443000X/?tag=slatmaga-20">Thomas Piketty’s global wealth tax</a> to President Obama’s call to raise the minimum wage. What’s missing from the conversation is how, exactly, any of this is going to happen, absent some sort of serious organized pressure from below. That’s what unions have always provided: the on-the-ground “how” to the pie-in-the-sky “what.”</p>
<p>It is possible that the 21st century will yield other alternatives for this sort of organized economic effort—new forms of online petitioning or philanthropy or communication that will put all of the old questions to rest. From a historical perspective, though, the prospects look dim. Today’s Supreme Court may have issued a narrow decision but it raised a large question: Do Americans want unions to exist anymore? If so, there’s some serious work to do.</p>Mon, 30 Jun 2014 22:08:31 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2014/06/supreme_court_harris_decision_if_you_care_about_income_inequality_you_should.htmlBeverly Gage2014-06-30T22:08:31ZIf you care about income inequality you should.News and PoliticsIf You Care About Income Inequality, You Should Care About the Future of Unions100140630021supreme courtBeverly GageHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2014/06/supreme_court_harris_decision_if_you_care_about_income_inequality_you_should.htmlfalsefalsefalseIf You Care About Income Inequality, You Should Care About the Future of UnionsIf You Care About Income Inequality, You Should Care About the Future of UnionsPhoto via Wikimedia Commons An 1886 engraving of the Haymarket Affair, in Chicago, a pivotal moment in the nascent labor movement.Band of Burglarshttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2014/01/media_pa_fbi_break_in_revelations_what_we_can_learn_from_them_about_intelligence.html
<p>On Tuesday, one of the biggest unsolved cases in FBI history burst wide open. In a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307962954/?tag=slatmaga-20">new book</a>, investigative journalist Betty Medsger revealed the identities of the anti-war activists who broke into the FBI's office in Media, Pa., in March 1971 and made off with the agency's secret files.* They were, it turns out, ordinary middle-class people: &quot;a religion professor, a daycare center worker, a graduate student in a health profession, another professor, a social worker, and two people who had dropped out of college to work nearly full-time on building opposition to the war,” Medsger writes. On March 8, 1971, they pried open the FBI office door with a crowbar, stole hundreds of files, and shook the intelligence establishment to its jackboots.</p>
<p>News coverage of the book and a related documentary, <em>1971</em> by filmmaker Johanna Hamilton, has focused, understandably, on their astonishing personal story: how the burglars planned and carried out the break-in and why they felt they had to act as they did. The parallels with Edward Snowden are obvious. Here, too, are people who risked their freedom to expose government secrets they believed to be damaging American democracy. One of the Media burglars, former Temple University religion professor John Raines, made the connection explicit in a recent appearance on the <em>Today </em>show<em>. </em>Asked what he would say to Snowden, he offered a self-conscious smile, then a modest shout-out: &quot;From one whistle-blower to another whistle-blower, 'Hi!' &quot;</p>
<p>The idea that one brave whistle-blower can make a difference is compelling, and it's true as far as it goes in the Media case: The burglars did take serious risks, and they did expose important secrets about FBI civil liberties abuses. But it's what happened <em>after </em>the burglary that really made the Media theft matter—and provides a model for anyone hoping to see genuine intelligence reform today.</p>
<p>It's because of Media that we first learned about COINTELPRO, the FBI's secret counterintelligence program aimed at domestic dissenters. The Media theft also fueled calls for reform that led to the creation of the Church Committee in 1975 and the restraining of the intelligence establishment that followed. Neither of these outcomes, however, was the direct result of the burglars' actions. The perpetrators came and went, committing their dramatic act then disappearing back into private life for the next 43 years. It was up to everyone else—journalists, activists, senators, and representatives—to take what they had exposed and to turn it into something meaningful.</p>
<p>The burglary itself was the brainchild of William Davidon, a physics professor at Haverford College and a passionate opponent of the Vietnam War. In 1966, Davidon had traveled to Vietnam with the left-wing Reverend A. J. Muste and earned the dubious honor of being expelled by South Vietnamese officials. By 1970, Davidon had begun to entertain more radical tactics for ending the war. Working with the nonviolent Catholic peace movement, he helped to carry out raids on draft-board offices around Philadelphia, in which activists would steal and often destroy selective service files. This gave him an even more ambitious idea: What if he could break into an FBI office and steal the documents there? It was conventional wisdom on the left that the FBI was spying on anti-war activists, but director J. Edgar Hoover held his files sacrosanct, refusing to provide raw FBI material even to congressional committees. As Medsger tells it, Davidon saw direct theft as the only way to find out what was really happening.</p>
<p>Not everyone he approached was enthused about the plan. &quot;You know, somebody says to you, 'Let's go break into the FBI office,' &quot; Media participant Keith Forsyth recalled. &quot;So you look at them and say, 'Yeah, okay, let's go break-in. Then, after we finish that, let's go down to Fort Knox and steal a few million.' &quot; By early 1971, though, Davidon had assembled an eight-member team, including Forsyth; Raines; Raines's wife, Bonnie; and a Philadelphia-area social worker named Bob Williamson. (Medsger's book identifies five burglars by name and two by pseudonym; she did not locate the final participant.)</p>
<p>As the story has been told ever since, the break-in itself always came across as a last-minute, amateur-hour job in which the burglars simply lucked out. In fact, as Medsger shows, they planned carefully for months, casing the FBI office night after night, holding dozens of logistical meetings, even setting up a fake door for lock-picking practice. When the big night came, they found that the FBI had put a new high-security lock on the main door, requiring the deployment of a crowbar on an alternate entrance rather than those hard-won lock-picking skills. Other than that, things went more or less as planned. Working quietly in near-total darkness, they stole every file in the office, then retreated to a Pennsylvania farmhouse to sort through what they had gathered.</p>
<p>The revelations went well beyond anything the activists had imagined. The FBI was, indeed, spying on the anti-war movement, just as it was spying on a vast range of civil rights, New Left, and student groups. But it was also seeking, in the words of one stolen document, to &quot;enhance the paranoia&quot; of anti-war activists through repeated interviews and harassment. It is worth noting that many of these efforts were far more intrusive than the passive National Security Agency surveillance recently documented by Snowden; the FBI was planting rumors, intimidating activists, and using agents provocateur. On the other hand, Hoover's FBI never had access to truly mass surveillance technology, and even its most aggressive programs never reached anything like the indiscriminate data-gathering of today's NSA.</p>
<p>The last act of the Media burglars was to photocopy the documents and mail them off to a handful of carefully selected recipients, including Sen. George McGovern, who had just announced his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Medsger herself, then a reporter at the <em>Washington Post. </em>With that, the burglary team packed up the farmhouse and dispersed, agreeing never to contact one another or to speak of the events again. A few violated the agreement in small ways; Davidon, for one, could not resist occasional bromides against the FBI. For the most part, however, they simply continued on with their private lives. On Tuesday, my colleague John Witt emailed me with the news that &quot;FBI burglar Bonnie Raines was my preschool teacher&quot; in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s. &quot;We thought she was an inspired progressive child development guru,&quot; he notes. &quot;Really she was a wanted criminal hiding out among the blocks and crayons.&quot;</p>
<p>Much of Medsger's book focuses on the FBI investigation that followed: five years, more than 200 agents, millions of dollars, and … bupkis—no arrests, no trial. The real drama happened outside the courtroom, as the stolen documents began to come to light. The burglars' decision to remain anonymous had important consequences for how the files were received. Without an individual culprit (or hero) to embody the cause, the Media story never quite achieved the legendary status of the Pentagon Papers, leaked three months later by Daniel Ellsberg. At the same time, anonymity shifted the debate away from act itself—whistle-blowing or treason?—and toward the content of the documents. Unlike Snowden or Ellsberg, the Media burglars had little ability to control how people interpreted what they had risked so much to present. In that sense, the break-in was an enormous leap of faith: The burglars committed the initial act but left it up to everyone else to finish the job.</p>
<p>Some of their faith proved to be misplaced. On the day the first files arrived in reporters' mailboxes, Attorney General John Mitchell issued a press release urging recipients to return the documents to the FBI, for fear of jeopardizing national intelligence capacities. His arguments will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the Snowden case: &quot;Disclosure of information in files stolen from an FBI office in Media, PA,&quot; the press release insisted, &quot;could endanger the lives of some federal agents and the security of the United States.&quot; McGovern complied with the request, sending the files back to the FBI. Publicly, he claimed that he supported a congressional investigation of FBI abuses but could not condone the law-breaking by the burglars, whoever they might be.</p>
<p>It was reporters, rather than politicians, who took up the cause during these early weeks—most notably, Medsger herself at the <em>Washington Post</em>. In that sense, the Media burglary foreshadowed not only the Pentagon Papers but also the Watergate scandal, which began with another burglary a year later, in June 1972. In Watergate, as in Media, early press reports kept the story alive and revealed enough sordid details to push congressional committees to take up the issue. Of particular significance in the Media case were the efforts of NBC reporter Carl Stern, who seized upon a strange word—COINTELPRO—in one of the stolen documents and filed a successful Freedom of Information Act request to find out what it meant.</p>
<p>COINTELPRO turned out to be the single most important revelation to emerge from the Media files—a &quot;counterintelligence program&quot; of operatic proportions, still the most infamous of Hoover's many infamous violations of civil liberties. Indeed, Hoover himself had anticipated what might happen, quietly canceling the COINTELPRO in April 1971, a month after the Media burglary. It took another four years, however, for Congress to launch a full-scale investigation of the FBI. During that time, Hoover died, the Watergate investigation blew up, the Vietnam War ended, and Richard Nixon resigned from office. Given that timeline, it is something of a stretch to say that Media led directly to the Church Committee. What we can say is that the Church Committee might not have happened without the Media burglary—and without everything that happened in between.</p>
<p>In the end, the Church Committee (which investigated the CIA and other intelligence agencies as well as the FBI) was a mixed success. After months of research, the committee delivered a searing multivolume report, still one of the most critical government documents ever published on the subject of U.S. intelligence. From that outcry came many of the institutions that govern espionage and surveillance today, including the congressional intelligence committees and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. These were real changes for the time—the first substantive efforts at legislative and judicial accountability in the history of American intelligence. But as recent events have shown, they had real weaknesses and limitations.</p>
<p>Today, we are once again facing a legitimacy crisis within the intelligence establishment, arguably the greatest such crisis since the 1970s. As in the 1970s, this is also a moment ripe with possibilities for reform. President Obama has called key lawmakers to the White House on Thursday for a private conference to discuss what to do next about the NSA. This discussion would not be happening without the evidence provided by whistle-blowers like Snowden. But as the Media burglary suggests, whistle-blowers can only do so much. What happens next is up to the rest of us.</p>
<p><em><strong>Correction, Jan. 10, 2014:</strong> This article originally suggested that author Betty Medsger also made a documentary film about the FBI break-in. The documentary, 1971, is by filmmaker Johanna Hamilton.</em></p>Thu, 09 Jan 2014 17:45:58 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2014/01/media_pa_fbi_break_in_revelations_what_we_can_learn_from_them_about_intelligence.htmlBeverly Gage2014-01-09T17:45:58ZThe infamous Media, Pa., FBI break-in paved the way for the Church Committee. Can it inspire intelligence reform in our own time?News and PoliticsWhat New Revelations About the Media, Pa., FBI Break-In Teach Us About Intelligence Reform Today100140109009historygovernment surveillancenational security agencyBeverly GageHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2014/01/media_pa_fbi_break_in_revelations_what_we_can_learn_from_them_about_intelligence.htmlfalsefalsefalseWhat New Revelations About the Media, Pa., FBI Break-In Teach Us About Intelligence Reform TodayWhat New Revelations About the Media, Pa., FBI Break-In Teach Us About Intelligence Reform TodayCourtesy Joseph V. Labolito/Temple University Photography DeptOne of the Media burglars, Temple University Professor of Religion John Raines.It’s Not About Your Cat Photoshttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/06/nsa_prism_program_can_we_trust_the_government_with_our_secrets_no.html
<p>Since last week’s revelations about the NSA, skeptics have questioned whether expansive intelligence powers might really lead to civil liberties abuses. From a historical perspective, there’s no need to ask: Such abuses have occurred many, many times.</p>
<p>Over the past century, American intelligence agencies have performed some amazing feats, outing Soviet infiltrators, hunting down terrorists, and keeping the homeland reasonably safe from its enemies. They have also used their powers to spy on millions of people engaged in legitimate political activity, and to go after critics in Congress, the media, and the public at large. Given this track record, it’s worth asking not whether such abuses might again occur, but whether we have sufficient reason to believe that they are not<em> </em>going to happen this time around.</p>
<p>To say that the expansion of surveillance powers comes with a high—and historically well-documented—risk of abuse is not to say that the NSA is interested in your cat photos. If you’ve never expressed an edgy political idea, you’re probably not at great personal risk. The people swept into the net at moments of expanded intelligence powers have almost always been outspoken political dissenters or critics of the intelligence establishment. The basic premise of the civil libertarian stance is that what happens to those people matters to all of us—not only because “we might be next” but because the free exchange of political ideas and criticism is the heart of American democracy.</p>
<p>So that’s the principle: Democracy requires protecting unpopular speech, and state surveillance tends to make people quiet. Then there’s the more practical side of things. In the past, when intelligence agencies have gained broad, unfettered powers, they have often used those powers not to protect the country but to protect themselves.</p>
<p>J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI stands as the example par excellence—an extreme but not fundamentally exceptional case of intelligence gathering gone awry. Last week I <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/06/prism_j_edgar_hoover_would_have_loved_the_nsa_s_surveillance_program_topic.html">wrote</a> a bit about COINTELPRO, the FBI’s notorious program of surveillance and disruption against targets ranging from Students for a Democratic Society to the Ku Klux Klan. But there’s another side to the FBI’s history of abuses—one that has less to do with attacks on political “subversives” than with the agency’s response to its mainstream critics.</p>
<p>Under Hoover the FBI devoted enormous resources to investigating people who publicly criticized intelligence operations or sought to challenge the powers of the FBI. Hoover’s targets extended from high-ranking members of the media and Congress down to ordinary citizens shooting the breeze. On one occasion, for instance, agents showed up to interview a Brooklyn liquor importer who had made the mistake of repeating a rumor that the FBI director might be “queer.” After a few minutes with the agents, who reminded him that Hoover’s “personal conduct is beyond reproach,” the man assured them that he held “no malice toward Mr. Hoover; that as a matter of fact he thinks Mr. Hoover has done a wonderful job.”</p>
<p>The interview had nothing to do with national security or even political dissent. But FBI agents didn’t necessarily view it that way. Charged with protecting American democracy from existential threats, they often saw themselves as a noble vanguard, possessed of secret, high-stakes knowledge, performing dangerous tasks that nobody else would or could. In this context, protecting the country meant protecting the FBI’s institutional power, and that meant protecting Hoover. If agents had qualms about this, there was little room to express them.&nbsp; To seriously criticize FBI policy, an employee would have had to do what NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden just did: give up a prosperous, interesting career and risk the wrath of a huge intelligence apparatus.</p>
<p>Even outside of the bureau, Hoover exercised powerful forms of control over potential critics. If the FBI learned a particularly juicy tidbit about a congressman, for instance, agents might show up at his office to let him know that his secrets—scandalous as they might be—were safe with the bureau. This had the predictable effect: Throughout the postwar years, Washington swirled with rumors that the FBI had a detailed file on every federal politician. There was some truth to the accusation. The FBI compiled background information on members of Congress, with an eye to both past scandals and to political ideology. But the files were probably not as extensive or all-encompassing as people believed them to be. The point was that it didn’t matter: The belief alone was enough to keep most politicians in line, and to keep them voting yes on FBI appropriations.</p>
<p>The same held true for members of the media. A critical column inevitably earned its author an FBI file. It might also come with a variety of other consequences. In 1936, when the famed columnist Westbrook Pegler mocked the FBI as a group of show-boaters, Hoover immediately removed him from the bureau’s media contact list, complaining that Pegler suffered from “mental halitosis.” Though Hoover and Pegler later reconciled, the FBI maintained a file on him for decades, just at it did for dozens of other media figures. Under this system, damning information could be leaked to more hospitable reporters (conservative columnist George Sokolsky was a particular favorite) or held for use at some future date.</p>
<p>One would hope that today’s NSA has better things to do than investigate its critics in the media, and that the safeguards now in place—congressional oversight committees, FISA courts—have in fact curtailed the kinds of abuses committed at Hoover’s FBI. But make no mistake: Those abuses occurred, and under the right circumstances they can occur again.</p>Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:03:13 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/06/nsa_prism_program_can_we_trust_the_government_with_our_secrets_no.htmlBeverly Gage2013-06-10T22:03:13ZThe government almost always abuses its surveillance powers. That should trouble every American citizen.News and PoliticsCan We Trust the Government With Our Secrets? History Says No.100130610014government surveillanceBeverly GageHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/06/nsa_prism_program_can_we_trust_the_government_with_our_secrets_no.htmlfalsefalsefalseCan We Trust the Government With Our Secrets? History Says No.Can We Trust the Government With Our Secrets? History Says No.Courtesy of the Federal Bureau of InvestigationFBI Director Hoover receives the National Security Medal from President Dwight Eisenhower on May 27, 1955, as Vice President Richard Nixon and others look on.Somewhere, J. Edgar Hoover Is Smilinghttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/06/prism_j_edgar_hoover_would_have_loved_the_nsa_s_surveillance_program_topic.html
<p>On March 8, 1971, a handful of activists broke into the FBI’s field office in Media, Penn., and made off with a stack of incriminating documents. Over the next several months, they began to publish what they had learned. In the pre-Internet age, this often meant reprinting the FBI records in the alternative press, though papers such as the <em>Washington Post </em>and <em>New York Times </em>also picked them up. Like <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data">Glenn Greenwald’s recent revelations</a> about the NSA, the discoveries from the Media break-in sparked widespread public outrage—and turned out to be one of the biggest scoops in intelligence history.</p>
<p>The program they exposed was called COINTELPRO (short for “counterintelligence program”), known today as the most notorious of the many notorious secret operations authorized by former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Under COINTELPRO, federal agents engaged in a jaw-dropping array of abuses—not only widespread surveillance of law-abiding American citizens, but also active “disruption” efforts against political organizations and activist leaders. The most famous is perhaps the FBI’s bugging of Martin Luther King’s hotel rooms, an effort that captured King in a variety of sexually compromising situations. When the press refused to peddle the sex stories (yes, the press used to refuse to peddle sex stories), the FBI sent King an anonymous note urging him to drop out of politics, and potentially to commit suicide. “You are done,” the letter declared. “There is but one way out for you.”</p>
<p>There can be no question that COINTELPRO was more intrusive—if also more targeted—than today’s apparent efforts at mass technological surveillance by the National Security Agency. But there is at least one important distinction that makes today’s scandal far more disturbing. When the FBI launched COINTELPRO, it was acting alone, outside of the boundaries of established law. Today, what the NSA is doing appears to be legal—and nearly every branch of the government is complicit. Unlike Hoover’s activities, the NSA’s programs come to us with the seal of congressional and judicial approval. It didn’t take J. Edgar Hoover to engineer this scandal. We did it to ourselves.</p>
<p>* * *<br /> <br /> </p>
<p>From his earliest days as FBI director, Hoover had shown a talent for skirting the law. When Franklin Roosevelt encouraged him to look into domestic fascist and communist movements in the late 1930s, Hoover took this as a secret mandate to launch mass intelligence operations. When Congress outlawed wiretapping that same decade, Hoover interpreted the new statute to mean that he should not disclose wiretap evidence in court—then continued to wiretap as part of his ongoing intelligence operations. For<a></a> Hoover, the sanctity and secrecy of FBI records was always the top concern; if it seemed that a secret program might be exposed, he often tried to shut it down. In at least one case, he allowed a known Soviet spy to walk free rather than take the risk that he would be forced to produce raw FBI reports in front of a jury of citizens.</p>
<p>Such secrecy was arguably easier to maintain in the 1950s and 1960s for a simple reason: Outside of appropriations hearings, intelligence agencies were not subject to much congressional oversight. Theoretically, Hoover worked for the attorney general, who worked for the president, and FBI policies were approved up the chain of command. In reality, he worked for himself and did mostly what he wanted. This is not to say that Hoover was a rogue actor, engaged in activities that would have horrified his Washington contemporaries. Rather, most politicians understood the deal: The FBI might be up to no good, but it was in the interests of national security, and it was best not to ask too many questions.</p>
<p>As a result, most efforts to expose the FBI’s operations came from outside of Washington, and from outside the mainstream press. 1960s activists had been complaining for years that the FBI was bugging their meetings, planting informers, disrupting their relationships and organizations. But until the Media break-in they had little by way of hard proof. In that sense, the Media revelations—like the ongoing NSA scandal—were less about shock and surprise than about confirmation: The government was in fact doing everything you already sort of knew it was doing. After the Media burglary, COINTELPRO entered the popular lexicon as the shorthand designation for an entire universe of government surveillance, lies, and betrayal. PRISM may now take on a similar life, a one-word reminder that the government may, in fact, be watching your keystrokes.</p>
<p>The FBI responded to the Media break-in by circling the wagons. Hoover cut back on counterintelligence activities, punished the local office chiefs, and set about trying to catch the burglars. But he had little luck. The Media burglary—“Medburg,” in the FBI’s lexicon—still ranks as one of the Bureau’s great unsolved cases.</p>
<p>The political consequences were severe, however, and took several years to play out. In October 1971, a group of prominent civil liberties activists gathered at Princeton University for a conference to pressure the government into enacting intelligence oversight and reform. But it was not until 1975, in the wake of Watergate, that Congress itself took action. That year Idaho Sen. Frank Church led a sweeping congressional investigation into intelligence abuses, one the most expansive such efforts in American history.</p>
<p>What he found confirmed the revelations from Media and then some, exposing COINTELPRO as a program that swept in groups from the Weathermen to the Ku Klux Klan. Hoover himself had died by that point, and he made an easy scapegoat, a larger-than-life figure who had amassed more power than any single man deserved, and who had used it to make a mockery of American democratic tradition. The discoveries went well beyond Hoover, though, and well beyond the FBI. According to the Church Committee reports, every federal intelligence agency had engaged in widespread civil liberties abuses over the previous 30 years, beginning with mass surveillance of domestic political groups and moving on up through the assassination of foreign leaders.</p>
<p>The result was a new system of oversight—institutions like the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the FISA courts that govern intelligence activities today. When they were created, these new mechanisms were supposed to stop the kinds of abuses that men like Hoover had engineered. Instead, it now looks as if they have come to function as rubber stamps for the expansive ambitions of the intelligence community. J. Edgar Hoover no longer rules Washington, but it turns out we didn’t need him anyway.</p>Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:10:10 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/06/prism_j_edgar_hoover_would_have_loved_the_nsa_s_surveillance_program_topic.htmlBeverly Gage2013-06-07T17:10:10ZThe FBI director and notorious snoop would have loved PRISM.News and PoliticsPRISM: Like Something J. Edgar Hoover Would Have Imagined, Only Worse100130607019government surveillancegovernment surveillanceBeverly GageHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/06/prism_j_edgar_hoover_would_have_loved_the_nsa_s_surveillance_program_topic.htmlfalsefalsefalsePRISM: Like Something J. Edgar Hoover Would Have Imagined, Only WorsePRISM: Like Something J. Edgar Hoover Would Have Imagined, Only WorsePhoto by Marion S. Trikosko/Library of CongressJ. Edgar Hoover in 1961. The FBI director oversaw a controversial domestic spying program called COINTELPRO.Unanswered Questions About Watergatehttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/04/robert_redford_watergate_documentary_all_the_president_s_men_revisited.html
<p>The title of Robert Redford’s new documentary, which aired on the Discovery Channel last night, is <em>All the President’s Men Revisited</em>. At times, it seems more like <em>All the President’s Men Repeated</em>. Though created to coincide with the 40<sup>th</sup> anniversary of Watergate, the first half of the film contains little that could not be found in Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/6304696493/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=6304696493&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">political thriller</a> starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman. You know the story: A pair of scrappy young reporters named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein stick to their guns when nobody else will, and their reporting helps to bring down a president.</p>
<p>This is, to be sure, a terrific story. No matter how many times you’ve heard it before, there is something gripping about watching Nixon’s slow, painful descent into national disgrace. Redford’s film hits all the highlights: Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler dismissing the original break-in as a “third-rate burglary”; Woodward and Bernstein scrambling to “follow the money” all the way to the White House; Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield admitting to Congress that his boss maintained a voice-activated taping system; Nixon’s restrained farewell address to the nation, then his devastating, heartfelt goodbye to the White House staff.</p>
<p>As far as it goes, the film is a reasonably adequate primer on Watergate mythology, and it’s certainly fun to watch. But it is also a missed opportunity for historical reflection—and one that, given the age of most Watergate participants, is unlikely to come around again. Forty years out, we know most of the basic facts about Watergate. The real challenge is figuring out what they all meant.</p>
<p>The film begins with footage of Nixon mugging for cameramen (awkwardly, as always) just before his August 1974 resignation speech. Redford then cuts back to June 1972, when the neophyte reporter Woodward received an assignment involving some sort of botched break-in at DNC headquarters. There is no hint of the controversies that have dogged Woodward in recent years, such as the accusation that his reporting (then and now) relies too heavily on anonymous inside sources. Redford sticks to the script first introduced in Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671894412/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0671894412&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">All the President’s Men</a></em>, then repeated in the 1976 film, laying out how the “good guys” in the media got the bad guy in the White House.</p>
<p>We now know, however, that Watergate was more complicated than that. Woodward and Bernstein did perform heroic work in the early months after the break-in. But the Watergate story didn’t capture national attention until 1973, well after Nixon had been re-elected to office. In those early months, some of the <em>Post</em>’s best information came straight from government investigators, already conducting their own troubled but expansive inquiries largely outside of public view. By far the most famous of these was Deep Throat—now largely accepted to have been <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/chatterbox/2005/05/deep_throat_antihero.html">W. Mark Felt</a>, the FBI’s No. 2 man, who died in 2008. The film shows an aged Felt waving at reporters from behind his walker in 2005, when he revealed his identity to <em>Vanity Fair. </em>But Redford barely explores the implications of this revelation: Was Felt using Woodward for his own ends, and if so why?</p>
<p>The journalist Max Holland took up this question in his 2012 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0700618295/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0700618295&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat</em></a>. Working painstakingly through FBI files and other Watergate material, Holland argued that Felt leaked information to Woodward in order to win a “war of succession” then underway at the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover had died in May 1972, a month before the Watergate burglary. Like many top FBI officials, Felt wanted the job. Instead, Nixon appointed FBI outsider L. Patrick Gray, setting off a chain of events that even a conspiracy-minded president could not control. Holland makes a powerful case that Felt was an ambitious, skilled bureaucrat out to serve his own interests rather than the “conscience-stricken” man who appears in Redford’s documentary.</p>
<p>Indeed, it’s entirely possible Watergate never would have blown up in the way it did if Hoover had simply lived a few months longer. Hoover and Nixon were close friends and political allies, going back to their work on the <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2007/07/alger_hiss_rides_again.html">Alger Hiss case</a> in the 1940s. They had some serious disagreements during Nixon’s presidency, mainly over issues such as wiretapping and surveillance procedures. But whatever his flaws or resentments, Hoover knew how to keep things quiet in politically delicate situations. On the White House tapes, Nixon can be heard lamenting the loss of his old friend as the Watergate crisis escalated.&nbsp; “I could talk to Hoover about all sorts of things and I talked to him very freely over the years,” he told “hatchet man” Chuck Colson in February 1973, “and there it never, never came out.”</p>
<p>One of the great ironies of Watergate is that Nixon actually knew Felt was leaking, but felt powerless to stop him, at least at first. “If we move on him,” Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman warned his boss as early as October 1972, “he’ll go out and unload everything.” Redford could have used a bit more of this lesser-known detail, if only to add some tension and interpretive verve to his good-guys-vs.-bad-guys story. Instead, for historical perspective he mostly relies on celebrity pundits such as Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Joe Scarborough. Their commentary can be pungent. “Every generation has to lose their virginity,” Stewart says, in one of the film’s more disturbing metaphors, “and it was just the day my generation did.” The result, though, is a certain amount of conventional wisdom. Over the course of the documentary, we learn that Nixon was “fatally flawed” and that the country was in “turmoil” throughout the Watergate years—analysis that could have been offered up by most self-respecting AP history students.</p>
<p>For sheer weirdness, no moment in the film surpasses the breakdown of former Nixon speechwriter turned game show host Ben Stein. Asked about Nixon’s resignation, Stein slumps down and begins to cry. “It was really sad, really sad,” he says. “I don’t think any president has been more wrongly persecuted than Nixon—ever. I just think he was a saint.”</p>
<p>The effect is mildly ridiculous. All the same, Stein provides one of the film’s few hints that Watergate is not, even now, an entirely settled matter. With four decades’ perspective, there are still big political questions to ask: How did a Republican Party on the verge of collapse in 1974 surge back six years later to launch the Age of Reagan? How much of the scandal was really about Nixon and his paranoia, and how much was about a broader set of institutional and political rivalries? Did the reforms put in place after the scandal—on presidential power, on intelligence prerogatives—effectively constrain the executive branch? To what degree did Watergate, once seen as a great Democratic triumph, help to fuel a conservative anti-government backlash?</p>
<p>The film gestures toward a few of these questions. Fundamentally, though, Redford’s main interest is in the media, and in the shining example set long ago by Woodward and Bernstein. And historians themselves have only begun to consider Watergate’s long-term consequences. Accounts of the scandal tend to fall into one of two modes. The first are blow-by-blow histories: What did Nixon know and when did he know it? The second are cultural examinations, looking at how, why, and when we classify Nixon as sinner or saint. Outside of that, Watergate has languished in recent years as a subject for serious research. The ’70s are a hot decade within the historical profession at the moment. But most recent books deal with other matters: deindustrialization, culture and gender, the fracturing of intellectual life, race, and civil rights. Watergate itself is increasingly a footnote, or an obligatory paragraph, rather than the political bombshell it once was.&nbsp;</p>
<p>One key question, 40 years out, is what the whole story can tell us about today’s fractious political scene. On this front, Redford’s film does offer a few tantalizing thoughts. Rachel Maddow argues, for instance, that Obama’s fondness for drones and secret intelligence operations owes much to Nixon’s “imperial presidency.” Bernstein himself suggests that the Watergate era may look shockingly good when compared to today’s bitter partisan politics. In 1974, he notes, Republicans and Democrats finally joined together to serve the public interest by ousting the president. What’s unimaginable in our own political age may not be the recurrence of a Watergate-style scandal, but the possibility that things would turn out so well.</p>Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:26:19 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/04/robert_redford_watergate_documentary_all_the_president_s_men_revisited.htmlBeverly Gage2013-04-22T14:26:19ZThere are many—why is no one asking them?ArtsIf J. Edgar Hoover Had Lived a Few Months Longer, Would Watergate Never Have Happened?100130422006Beverly GageHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/04/robert_redford_watergate_documentary_all_the_president_s_men_revisited.htmlfalsefalsefalseIf J. Edgar Hoover Had Lived a Few Months Longer, Would Watergate Never Have Happened?If J. Edgar Hoover Had Lived a Few Months Longer, Would Watergate Never Have Happened?Photo by ReutersPresident Richard Nixon says goodbye to family and staff in the White House East Room on Aug. 9, 1974Things Can Changehttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/12/newtown_shooting_gun_violence_may_seem_ineradicable_but_history_suggests.html
<p><em><a href="http://www.slate.com/topics/c/connecticut_schoolshooting.html">Read the rest of <strong>Slate</strong>’s coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting.</a></em></p>
<p>In 1985, when I was 13 years old, a woman suffering from schizophrenia brought a semiautomatic rifle to our local mall and began shooting. This was the mall where I picked out clothes from the Gap, where I sat for photos with Santa Claus as a toddler, where kids my age were just starting to hang out and flaunt their independence. The woman, 25-year-old Sylvia Seegrist, killed three people, including a 2-year-old child, and shot several others before being subdued by a man who thought she was shooting blanks. When asked why she had done it, Seegrist said, bizarrely, that “my family makes me nervous.” In other words, there was no reason at all.</p>
<p>As a middle-schooler, I registered the event only in the haziest terms: I knew something terrible had happened, I was glad it hadn’t happened to me, and I figured the adults would take care of the rest. Now, as an adult, what seems shocking is just how little was done. There were calls for keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, for better treatment and commitment laws, for more restrictive gun control, for greater community vigilance to identify people prone to violence. But none of it, apparently, mattered quite enough. Fourteen years after the Springfield Mall shooting came Columbine, then Virginia Tech, and now Sandy Hook Elementary.</p>
<p>Like millions of other heartsick people, I am inclined to despair at this list, to think that though all of this must change, it never will. But as a historian I am reminded that change often comes slowly, and with great pain and effort. A century ago, there were forms of graphic, brutal violence considered so thoroughly American that they could never be banished from the national landscape. Today they no longer exist. In the story of how these changes happened, there may be a model—or a least a bit of hope—for the present.</p>
<p>One example is class violence, once seen a shameful but ineradicable feature of American life. Beginning in the 1870s, the United States became infamous around the world for the brutality of its labor clashes, in which gun battles, dynamitings, and hand-to-hand combat produced what seemed to be an unending stream of senseless death. Sometimes the violence came at the hands of police: 100 strikers killed during the rail uprising of 1877, 11 children burned to death in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. On other occasions, it came as retaliation from below. In 1910, men employed by the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers blew up the headquarters of the anti-union <em>Los Angeles Times, </em>killing 21 printers and laborers working inside.</p>
<p><br /> Compared to today’s gun massacres, it is easy to see these earlier events as a more comprehensible form of violence, with obvious political motives and straightforward political solutions. Yet Americans at the time experienced them as a cause for national soul-searching, as well as a kind of helplessness and even despair. Muckraker Lincoln Steffens put it best, after the <em>L.A. Times </em>bombing. “What are we Americans going to do about conditions which are bringing up healthy, good-tempered boys … to really believe … that the only resource they have … is to use dynamite against property and life?”</p>
<p>The arguments that followed were fierce: Should the country enact new labor laws? Engender Christian renewal? Regulate guns and explosives? But the answers were obvious even then. Americans needed a better <a></a>process, enforced by the federal government, for managing labor-employer relations. Until the 1930s, advocates simply lacked the political will and public support to make it happen.</p>
<p>An even more intractable debate accompanied the rise and fall of lynching, one of the most gruesome forms of violence ever to take root in the United States. Today, we tend to remember lynching as a clandestine crime, a young black man pulled from his bed in the dark of night and brutalized or hanged in the Southern woods. For most of the late 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries, though, it was a community phenomenon of almost unthinkable cruelty, in which hundreds if not thousands of people gathered to witness a victim being disemboweled, castrated, tortured, or burned, then killed in full view.</p>
<p>To modern sensibilities, the injustice once again seems obvious, as do the solutions: Prosecute lynchers, fight for racial justice, strengthen the rule of law, and mobilize public opinion to condemn rather than excuse outbursts of brutality. And yet it took more than 100 years for lynching to begin to disappear as a feature of American life, and even longer for Americans to fully acknowledge the depth of its horror. In the meantime, thousands of influential people, including many esteemed congressmen and senators, argued that lynching was simply a fact of life, a random act of violence about which nothing could be done. It was not until 2005 that the U.S. Senate, spearheaded by Mary Landrieu, apologized for failing to pass federal anti-lynching legislation, and for leaving hundreds of innocent people to be sacrificed to official inaction.</p>
<p>The parallels between past and present are not perfect, of course. Today’s violence <em>is </em>more random, without rational motive or political purpose. Yet these examples tell us something important about how social change happens around violence, and about what we now need to do. Ending both lynching and class violence required efforts spread over many decades. And those efforts attacked the problem at multiple levels, from the passage of new federal laws to campaigns aimed at mobilizing public opinion.</p>
<p>Most of all, they required a mass rejection of the argument that this is just what America is like, and that there is nothing to be done. We’ve now lived with gun massacres for two generations. That’s long enough.</p>Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:48:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/12/newtown_shooting_gun_violence_may_seem_ineradicable_but_history_suggests.htmlBeverly Gage2012-12-17T14:48:00ZA century ago, there were forms of brutal violence considered so thoroughly American that they could never be banished. Today, they no longer exist.News and PoliticsGun Violence May Seem Ineradicable, but History Suggests Change Is Possible100121217007connecticut school shootingconnecticut school shootingBeverly GageHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/12/newtown_shooting_gun_violence_may_seem_ineradicable_but_history_suggests.htmlfalsefalsefalseGun Violence May Seem Ineradicable, but History Suggests Change Is PossibleGun Violence May Seem Ineradicable, but History Suggests Change Is PossiblePhotograph by Mario Tama/Getty Images.People gather at a memorial for victims near the school on the first Sunday following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 16, 2012 in Newtown, Conn.How Close Was This Election?http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/11/how_close_was_this_election_very_close.html
<p>There seems to be some confusion about whether or not the United States just witnessed a close election. Perhaps some historical perspective can help: Yes, this was a close election.</p>
<p>Here’s why:&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>If we include Florida, Obama appears to have won 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206. In the popular vote, the latest numbers suggest an Obama victory of 50.4 percent to Romney’s 48.1.&nbsp;This is not recount territory. Measured by the standards of the 20<sup>th</sup>&nbsp;century, though, it reflects a genuinely tight race.</p>
<p>Between 1900 and 1999, only five<strong> </strong>of the 25 presidential elections were decided by fewer than 130 electoral votes. Only three had a popular vote margin smaller than the Obama-Romney contest. It’s a sign of how accustomed we’ve become to razor-thin margins of victory that Obama’s 2.3-percent popular-vote victory seems almost like a rout.&nbsp;</p>
<p>For much of the 20<sup>th</sup>&nbsp;century, decisive elections were the rule rather than the exception. In the 1920s, Republicans won all three presidential elections with anywhere from 54 to 60.3 percent of the popular vote. During 1930s and 1940s, the balance flipped, with Franklin Roosevelt winning anywhere from 53.4 to<strong> </strong>60.8<strong> </strong>percent of the popular vote, and as much as 98.5 percent of the Electoral College. That extraordinary run came to an end with the nail-biter of 1948, in which Harry Truman was widely predicted to lose to Republican Thomas Dewey. Even that race, though, turned out to have a wider popular margin of victory than Obama-Romney. When the votes were tallied, Truman won with 49.5 percent of the popular vote to Dewey’s 45.1 percent, and 303 electoral votes to Dewey’s 189.</p>
<p>The closest election of the 20<sup>th</sup>&nbsp;century was the bitterly contested showdown between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. Kennedy won the electoral college by a decisive if not overwhelming margin, garnering 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219. But the popular vote was more or less a tie, with Kennedy claiming just 49.7 percent to Nixon’s 49.5, amid widespread accusations of corruption and vote-buying.</p>
<p>Nixon came back eight years later with a squeaker of his own, winning over Hubert Humphrey by 0.7 percent of the popular vote. It’s worth noting, though, that both of these close elections were followed by absolute blowouts. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s trounced Barry Goldwater with 61.1 percent of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes. In 1972, Nixon won a landslide of his own, claiming 60.7 percent of the popular vote and a whopping 96.7 percent of the Electoral College. Whatever else was happening during those years, it was not an era of consistently close elections.</p>
<p>Outside of the 1960s, the tightest races of the 20<sup>th</sup>&nbsp;century produced popular-vote margins roughly comparable to Obama-Romney.&nbsp;In 1916, Woodrow Wilson won a second term with a popular-vote victory of 49.2 percent, to 46.1 percent for Republican stalwart Charles Evans Hughes. In 1976, Jimmy Carter rousted Gerald Ford 50.1 percent to 48. The electoral vote, in both cases, was narrower than Obama’s 2012 victory.</p>
<p>Other than that, every single election of the 20<sup>th</sup>&nbsp;century was decided by a larger popular or electoral margin than we’ve seen in 2012. Almost<strong> </strong>one-half of the century’s elections were decided by popular margins of more than 10 percent. What’s extraordinary about the present moment is not so much the narrow margin of victory as the consistent run of close elections. Americans who lived through the 1916 election had to wait more than three decades for a comparably tight contest. By contrast, three out of four of our last elections have been decided by a popular-vote margin of less than 3 percent. The time we saw anything approaching a landslide was Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1984.</p>
<p>In that sense, our own political moment best resembles the Gilded Age of the late 19<sup>th</sup>&nbsp;century, the last sustained period when close elections were the norm. Historians usually describe the Gilded Age as an uninspiring era in national politics, when party machines, back-room power-brokers, and a campaign-finance free-for-all led to lackluster national debate. It was also an era in which politics were unusually partisan, often at the expense of tackling the genuine challenges facing the nation: growing inequality, immigration, corporate power, urban development.</p>
<p>Lest this all sound too familiar, it’s worth noting some important differences: the presidency was less powerful in the 19<sup>th</sup>&nbsp;century and the electorate consisted mainly of white men. But the Gilded Age has at least one lesson to offer about what our repeated run of close elections might mean. Conventional wisdom suggests that close elections reflect a divided electorate: red/blue, liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat. The Gilded Age suggests that close elections may in fact be a sign that nobody, on either side, is thinking big.</p>Fri, 09 Nov 2012 15:08:56 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/11/how_close_was_this_election_very_close.htmlBeverly Gage2012-11-09T15:08:56ZVery close. Whatever happened to landslides?News and PoliticsElections Are So Close These Days. Why Aren’t There Landslides Anymore?100121109007campaign 2012campaign 2012Beverly GageHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/11/how_close_was_this_election_very_close.htmlfalsefalsefalseElections Are So Close These Days. Why Aren’t There Landslides Anymore?Elections Are So Close These Days. Why Aren’t There Landslides Anymore?Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney shake hands at the end of the third and final presidential debate on Oct. 22, 2012. Obama defeated Romney, but not by a landslide.Why Is There No Liberal Ayn Rand?http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/08/paul_ryan_and_ayn_rand_why_don_t_america_liberals_have_their_own_canon_of_writers_and_thinkers_.html
<p>Ask Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan how he became a conservative and he’ll probably answer by citing a book. It might be Ayn Rand’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452011876/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0452011876&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Atlas Shrugged</em></a><em>.</em> Or perhaps he’ll come up with Friedrich Hayek’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226320553/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0226320553&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Road to Serfdom</em></a><em>, </em>or even Barry Goldwater’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1604598921/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1604598921&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Conscience of a Conservative</em></a><em>. </em>All of these books are staples of the modern conservative canon, works with the reputed power to radicalize even the most tepid Republican. Over the last half-century, they have been vital to the conservative movement’s success—and to liberalism’s demise.</p>
<p>We tend to think of the conservative influence in purely political terms: electing Ronald Reagan in 1980, picking away at Social Security, reducing taxes for the wealthy. But one of the movement’s most lasting successes has been in developing a common intellectual heritage. Any self-respecting young conservative knows the names you’re supposed to spout: Hayek, Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock. There are some older thinkers too—Edmund Burke, for instance—but for the most part the favored thinkers come out of the movement’s mid-20<sup>th</sup> century origins in opposition to Soviet communism and the New Deal.</p>
<p>Liberals, by contrast, have been moving in the other direction over the last half-century, abandoning the idea that ideas can be powerful political tools.&nbsp; This may seem like a strange statement at a moment when American universities are widely understood to be bastions of liberalism, and when liberals themselves are often derided as eggheaded elites. But there is a difference between policy smarts honed in college classrooms and the kind of intellectual conversation that keeps a movement together. What conservatives have developed is what the left used to describe as a “movement culture”: a shared set of ideas and texts that bind activists together in common cause. Liberals, take note.<br /> </p>
<p>Once upon a time, the Old Left had “movement culture” par excellence: to be considered a serious activist, you had to read Marx and Lenin until your eyes bled. For better or worse, that never resulted in much electoral power (nor was it intended to) and within a few decades became the hallmark of pedantry rather than intellectual vitality.</p>
<p>The New Left reinvented that heritage in the 1960s. Instead of (or in addition to) Marx and Lenin, activists began to read Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and Saul Alinsky. As new, more particular movements developed, the reading list grew to include feminists, African-Americans, and other traditionally excluded groups. This vastly enhanced the range of voices in the public sphere—one of the truly great revolutions in American intellectual politics. But it did little to create a single coherent language through which to maintain common cause. Instead, the left ended up with multiple “movement cultures,” most of them more focused on issue-oriented activism than on a common set of ideas.</p>
<p>Liberals have channeled their energies even more narrowly over the past half-century, tending to prefer policy tweaks and electoral mapping to big-picture thinking. When was the last time you saw a prominent liberal politician ascribe his or her passion and interest in politics to, of all things, a book? The most dogged insistence on the influence of Obama’s early reading has come from his Tea Party critics, who fume constantly that he is about to carry out a secret plan laid out a half century ago by far-left writers ranging from Alinsky, the granddaddy of “community organizing,” to social reformer Frances Fox Piven.<br /> </p>
<p>Liberals may argue that they are better off knocking on doors and brainstorming policy than muddling through the great works of midcentury America. “Americans usually reject the party of theory,” E.J. Dionne wrote in Sunday’s <em>Washington Post, </em>responding to Ryan’s nomination, “which is what conservatism has now become.”<em> </em>The problem is that most liberals couldn’t put together the sort of intellectual short list that conservatives now take for granted even if they wanted to. In my Yale seminar on liberalism and conservatism, I try to assign some plausible candidates: Arthur Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Betty Friedan, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King, John Kenneth Galbraith. Undoubtedly many people reading this essay can come up with alternatives, and register strong objections to any of the above. But liberals rarely ever have the conversation. Putting together the conservative side of the syllabus is always vastly easier than putting together the liberal one, in part because conservatives themselves have put so much time and energy into the selection process.</p>
<p>Some of this imbalance is due to the relative weakness of the current American left. Liberals are not the logical counterweight to conservatives; leftists are, but they are few in number. Still, we have the political spectrum that we have, and liberals fail to take up the intellectual challenge at their peril. Conventional wisdom suggests that Romney may have doomed his electoral bid by choosing an ideologue—one who likes to go on about Ayn Rand!—as his vice presidential nominee. Yet it seems equally possible that Ryan’s nomination will do just what Romney wants: mobilize a base of committed activists who share most of Ryan’s basic ideas.</p>
<p>The default mode for liberals and progressives in such situations has often been to celebrate “diversity”—intellectual, racial, sexual, and of most other sorts. In many ways this is for the best. Nobody wants to return to an era in which politics and political ideas were dominated by a handful of white men, however thoughtful. Yet we rarely pause to consider what liberals have lost by neglecting a common intellectual heritage and by attempting to win political success without a political canon. At its best, a canon helps people put the pieces together, offering long-term goals and visions that sustain movements through periods of trial and defeat. Without those visions, liberals have no coherent way of explaining where we’re headed, or of measuring how far we’ve come.</p>
<p>In the current election this means that liberals also run the unnecessary risk of ceding intellectual authority to the right. Despite everything you may hear, Paul Ryan is not an original thinker or a great intellectual. Most of his big ideas were laid out 50 years ago by the thinkers—themselves <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_dilettante/2011/06/the_liberty_scam.html">often overrated</a>—who now make up the conservative canon. Perhaps this simply reinforces an old political truism: Liberals look to the future, while conservatives look to the past. But liberals could do worse than to heed Ryan’s words last Saturday, in his first speech as a vice presidential candidate. “America is more than just a place,” he noted, “it's an idea.”</p>Mon, 13 Aug 2012 18:23:03 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/08/paul_ryan_and_ayn_rand_why_don_t_america_liberals_have_their_own_canon_of_writers_and_thinkers_.htmlBeverly Gage2012-08-13T18:23:03ZAmerican conservatives have a canon. Why don’t American liberals?News and PoliticsWhy Is There No Liberal Ayn Rand?100120813008paul ryancampaign 2012Beverly GageHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/08/paul_ryan_and_ayn_rand_why_don_t_america_liberals_have_their_own_canon_of_writers_and_thinkers_.htmlfalsefalsefalseWhy Is There No Liberal Ayn Rand?Why Is There No Liberal Ayn Rand?Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/GettyImages.Paul Ryan greets supporters at a campaign stop. Ryan has been known to the cite the works of Ayn Rand. How come liberals don't have their own canon of must-read literary works?The Ode to Nixon Gabfesthttp://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2012/08/the_gabfest_mitt_romney_s_tax_plan_climate_change_politics_in_the_2012_election_and_paul_ryan_and_the_gop.html
<p><strong>Become a fan of the<u> </u></strong><a href="http://www.facebook.com/gabfest"><strong>Political Gabfest on Facebook</strong></a><strong>. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there.</strong> <strong>Or follow us </strong><a href="https://twitter.com/SlateGabfest"><strong>@SlateGabFest</strong></a><strong>!</strong><em></em></p>
<p><strong>To listen to the discussion, use the player below:</strong><em></em></p>
<p><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/slates-political-gabfest/id158004641"><strong>Subscribe in iTunes</strong></a><strong>&nbsp;∙&nbsp;</strong><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/SlatePoliticalGabfest"><strong>RSS feed</strong></a><strong>&nbsp;∙ <a href="http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/slatepoliticalgabfest/SPG12081001_Gabfest.mp3">Download</a> ∙ </strong><a href="http://soundcloud.com/slateradio/slate-the-ode-to-nixon-gabfest"><strong>Play in another tab</strong></a><strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Event: David Plotz will interview—or interrogate—his wife, <em>DoubleX</em> co-founder Hanna Rosin, about her new book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594488045/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1594488045&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The End of Men</em></a> on Sept. 11 in Washington (tickets <a href="http://www.sixthandi.org/EventDetails.aspx?evntID=824&amp;dispDt=9/11/2012">here</a>) and on Sept. 12 in New York City (more details <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/slate_fare/2012/08/the_end_of_men_hanna_rosin_interviewed_by_her_husband_slate_editor_david_plotz_about_her_new_book_.html">here</a>).</strong></p>
<p>On this week’s <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> Political Gabfest, Emily Bazelon hosts the program from New Haven, Conn., and welcomes two special guests: Yale history professor Beverly Gage and Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the <a href="http://environment.yale.edu/climate/">Yale Project on Climate Change Communication</a>. They discuss Mitt Romney’s tax plan, climate change in the United States, and a <em><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_lizza">New Yorker</a></em><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_lizza"> profile of Paul Ryan</a>.</p>
<p>Here are some of the links and references mentioned during this week's show:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/romney-plan.cfm">An analysis</a> by the Tax Policy Center of the Romney tax plan.</li>
<li>The <em>New York Times</em> has <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/us/politics/in-weak-economy-an-opening-to-court-votes-of-single-women.html?_r=2&amp;hp">a backgrounder</a> on the growing “swingle” vote; <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s Hanna Rosin <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/03/single_women_are_the_new_swing_voters_but_which_way_do_they_lean_.html">wrote</a> that this demographic is often misunderstood.</li>
<li>Emily talks about a new study by James Hansen on extreme weather events—Hansen has a <em>Washington Post</em> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-change-is-here--and-worse-than-we-thought/2012/08/03/6ae604c2-dd90-11e1-8e43-4a3c4375504a_story.html">op-ed</a> that summarizes his findings.</li>
<li>Anthony talks about his research on American opinions about climate change. An update to his “Six Americas” survey is <a href="http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2012/07/six-americas-update-increasing-concern-and-insights-on-weather-influences/">here</a>.</li>
<li>Bill McKibben’s <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719">recent piece</a> in <em>Rolling Stone</em> argues for the creation of a political movement around climate change.&nbsp;</li>
<li>Ryan Lizza’s <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_lizza">profile of Paul Ryan</a> in<em> The New Yorker</em>.</li>
</ul>
<p>Anthony chatters <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/08/07/the_kochs_vs_zach_galifinakis_and_aaron_sorkin.html">about criticism by the Koch brothers</a> of the new film <em>The Campaign</em>.</p>
<p>Beverly chatters about <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1451698097/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1451698097&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">The Communist</a></em>, a new book by Grove City College professor Paul Kengor.</p>
<p>Emily chatters about a trip to family court in Brooklyn, N.Y.</p>
<p>Topic ideas for next week? You can tweet suggestions, links, and questions to <a href="https://twitter.com/SlateGabfest">@SlateGabfest</a></p>
<p>The email address for the Political Gabfest is <a href="mailto:gabfest@slate.com">gabfest@slate.com</a>. (Email may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)</p>
<p>Podcast production by Andy Bowers and Dale Willman. Links compiled by Jeff Friedrich.</p>Fri, 10 Aug 2012 16:36:23 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2012/08/the_gabfest_mitt_romney_s_tax_plan_climate_change_politics_in_the_2012_election_and_paul_ryan_and_the_gop.htmlEmily BazelonBeverly GageAnthony Leiserowitz2012-08-10T16:36:23ZListen to <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s show about Mitt Romney’s tax plan, shifting public attitudes on climate change, and a <em>New Yorker</em> profile of Paul Ryan.PodcastsThe Gabfest on Mitt Romney’s Tax Plan, Climate Change Politics, and Paul Ryan100120810008climate changecampaign 2012paul ryanEmily BazelonBeverly GageAnthony LeiserowitzPolitical Gabfesthttp://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2012/08/the_gabfest_mitt_romney_s_tax_plan_climate_change_politics_in_the_2012_election_and_paul_ryan_and_the_gop.htmlfalsefalsefalseThe Gabfest on Mitt Romney’s Tax Plan, Climate Change Politics, and Paul RyanThe Gabfest on Mitt Romney’s Tax Plan, Climate Change Politics, and Paul RyanThe Boss of Bosseshttp://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2012/05/jpmorgan_scandal_what_we_can_learn_about_it_from_john_pierpont_morgan_s_fight_with_congress_100_years_ago_.html
<p>A hundred years ago, the most famous banker in America testified before Congress in one of his last public appearances. His name (hint: you’ve seen it in recent headlines) was John Pierpont Morgan, the redoubtable founding father of today’s JPMorgan Chase. At the time, Morgan was without peer in American banking, simultaneously the old man and the great innovator of American finance. The list of corporations he organized was legendary: U.S. Steel, International Harvester, General Electric. So was his personal power. From the dawn of the Gilded Age, he reigned as “the boss of bosses,” in the words of muckraker Lincoln Steffens, a mystical figurehead and ruthless businessman wrapped up in a single top-hatted, pot-bellied package.</p>
<p>It was in his capacity as the great “boss” of American finance capitalism that an elderly Morgan appeared before Congress in December 1912 to answer for Wall Street’s alleged sins. Five years earlier, he had helped to stave off national economic collapse when stock market manipulation yielded a near-catastrophic Wall Street bank run. Despite his success, the Panic of 1907 had inspired outrage across the nation. How was it possible that one man had the power to save or destroy the American economy? And why could the federal government, by contrast, do nothing? To many Americans, Morgan’s machinations seemed to prove that a shadowy “money trust” controlled the national economy. The congressional hearings, led by Louisiana Democrat Ars&egrave;ne Pujo, aimed to expose the secrets of the money trust once and for all.</p>
<p>Morgan arrived in Washington in regal fashion, surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers, subordinates, and supportive heirs. Under questioning, he was blunt and impatient, offering a show of congressional truculence later matched only by communists and tobacco executives. His answers often consisted of two outraged words: “No, sir.” &nbsp;When he spoke at greater length, he sought primarily to justify the Wall Street status quo. Morgan portrayed himself as a besieged aristocrat, misunderstood by the masses despite his efforts to do good. Rather than a master of the universe, he claimed to be a servant to duty and to the iron laws of economics.</p>
<p>Morgan’s defiant performance increased his heroic status on Wall Street; congratulations poured in from bankers and brokers. Outside those confines, though, his arrogance helped to seal the case for financial reform. Building off the Pujo hearings, future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis set out to write his influential <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031210314X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=031210314X">Other People’s Money</a>, </em>a vicious (if rather tedious) indictment of the “interlocking directorates” that allowed Morgan and other banks to exercise undue economic influence. Based partly on Pujo evidence as well, in 1913 the Wilson administration pushed through plans for a new central bank known as the Federal Reserve. Historians and economists have argued ever since about whether the creation of the Fed ultimately increased or decreased Wall Street’s power. But there can be no question about its political meaning at the time. In 1913, nearly all Americans saw the Fed as a major government triumph against the likes of J.P. Morgan, and the beginning of the end of the money-trust era.</p>
<p>Today’s debates over the Volcker Rule, Dodd-Frank, and the mistakes of JPMorgan Chase are more modest in scope—tinkering within a well-established institutional framework. Despite such differences of substance, their style owes much to the epic showdowns of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century. What was at stake in the Pujo hearings was not so much good or bad economics, free enterprise or government control. At issue was the uncomfortable democratic problem of who deserved to rule, and how much the public deserved to know. Could a man like Morgan be trusted to act in the country’s best interests? If not, would politicians, government bankers, and regulators do a better job? As JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon prepares to testify before the Senate Banking Committee later this summer, such questions are once again on the table.</p>
<p>Morgan himself was utterly contemptuous of public opinion and government policy, and he made no secret of his views. He saw banking as a specialist’s world, best conducted in secret among a handful of trusted men. As biographer Ron Chernow brilliantly described in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802138292/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0802138292">The House of Morgan</a></em>, the entire Morgan firm lived according to a “Gentleman Banker’s Code,” which frowned upon branch offices, company names on the door, and the open solicitation of business. “A man I do not trust,” Morgan explained at Pujo, “could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.”</p>
<p>This was hardly a free-market vision of the world, filled with scrappy entrepreneurs and courageous risk-takers. It’s a common misconception that the great tycoons of the Gilded Age were champions of laissez-faire, eager to liberate the competitive impulses of American finance and industry. To the contrary, they spent much of their time figuring out ways around competition—forming trusts, fixing prices, begging for tariff protection, manipulating stock, and rigging corporate boards. The greatest political battles of the era focused on precisely this problem, with industrialists and financiers pushing for concentration while government officials gestured—sometimes feebly, sometimes not—toward trust-busting and small-business competition.</p>
<p>Morgan was both the figurehead and architect of the anti-competitive strategy. His technique—known as “Morganization”—was relatively simple. Using his bank’s resources, he bought up smaller firms throughout a given industry, smashed them together, and produced a behemoth of a modern corporation, with Morgan men duly seated on the board. The goal, in part, was greater efficiency. But Morgan also explicitly criticized industrial competition as a destructive force that condemned the American economy to its Gilded Age cycle of boom and bust.</p>
<p>Morgan preferred to do his haggling in private, through quiet meetings at his midtown library or aboard his yacht the <em>Corsair</em>. Sometimes, though, the public got a glimpse of his visible hand shaping the political process. In 1896, Morgan pledged a quarter-million dollars to Republican presidential candidate William McKinley to defeat populist silver-money champion William Jennings Bryan—one of the first campaign-finance scandals in modern American history. A decade later, he strong-armed his fellow bankers into putting up funds to stop the 1907 panic, arguably his greatest act of civic beneficence. In both cases, he got what he wanted in the short term. But the sheer evidence of his ability to manipulate the system—and the potential for error along the way—fueled calls for greater transparency and reform.</p>
<p>Morgan died in 1913, a few months after his Pujo appearance, convinced that the nation had turned against him despite his many good deeds. Today, a similar refrain appears once again to be making its way through Morgan banking circles. Since 2008, JPMorgan Chase has been widely regarded as one of the “good banks,” cautious and farseeing in ways that would have made its founder proud. Partly for that reason, CEO Jamie Dimon emerged as one of Wall Street’s point men on the fight against regulation, the sort of banker who could be trusted to do things right without government intervention.</p>
<p>Now Dimon is being held up as proof that even the best bankers need oversight and transparency—the very sentiment that Morgan lamented in the months before his death. “The time is coming when all business will have to be done with glass pockets,” he complained a century ago, foreseeing an end to the secretive banking world in which he had made his career. Perhaps he would have taken heart in the knowledge that such a time has not yet come to pass.</p>Wed, 23 May 2012 16:18:52 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2012/05/jpmorgan_scandal_what_we_can_learn_about_it_from_john_pierpont_morgan_s_fight_with_congress_100_years_ago_.htmlBeverly Gage2012-05-23T16:18:52ZOne hundred years ago, John Pierpont Morgan was called before a Congress suspicious of his bank’s power and influence. Sound familiar?LifeIn 1912, J.P. Morgan Was Called Before a Congress Suspicious of His Bank’s Power. Sound Familiar?100120523007jpmorganjpmorganBeverly GageHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2012/05/jpmorgan_scandal_what_we_can_learn_about_it_from_john_pierpont_morgan_s_fight_with_congress_100_years_ago_.htmlfalsefalsefalseIn 1912, J.P. Morgan Was Called Before a Congress Suspicious of His Bank’s Power. Sound Familiar?In 1912, J.P. Morgan Was Called Before a Congress Suspicious of His Bank’s Power. Sound Familiar?Courtesy Images of American Political History.J.P. MorganThe Eat Your Broccoli Gabfesthttp://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2012/03/gabfest_supreme_court_on_obamacare_the_politics_of_the_case_and_judicial_elections_.html
<p><strong><em>Become a fan of the <a href="http://www.facebook.com/gabfest">Political Gabfest on Facebook</a>. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there.</em></strong></p>
<p><strong><em>To listen to the discussion, use the player below: </em></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/slates-political-gabfest/id158004641">Subscribe in iTunes</a>&nbsp;∙&nbsp;<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/SlatePoliticalGabfest">RSS feed</a>&nbsp;∙&nbsp;<a href="http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/slatepoliticalgabfest/SPG12033001_Gabfest.mp3">Download</a> ∙ <a href="http://player.podtrac.com/player?autoplay=true&amp;text=Play+Now&amp;mode=single&amp;rgb=660033&amp;h=300&amp;episode=http%3a%2f%2ffeedproxy.google.com%2f%7er%2fSlatePoliticalGabfest%2f%7e5%2fVhrJVXqDNDA%2fSPG12033001_Gabfest.mp3&amp;title=Slate%3a+The+Eat+Your+Broccoli+Gabfest&amp;type=link&amp;feed=http%3a%2f%2ffeeds.feedburner.com%2fSlatePoliticalGabfest">Play in another tab</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><em>Visit these links to get your free trials from this week’s sponsors: <a href="http://www.stamps.com/">Stamps.com</a> (promo code “GABFEST”) and <a href="http://www.audibleposcast.com/gabfest">www.audibleposcast.com/gabfest</a>.</em></strong></p>
<p><strong><em>John, David, and Emily are returning to Purdue University in Indiana for a live show on April 18. Register for free tickets <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2012/03/slate_political_gabfest_at_purdue_a_free_live_show_in_west_lafayette_indiana_.html">here</a>.</em></strong></p>
<p>On this week’s <strong><em>Slate</em> </strong>Political Gabfest, Emily Bazelon is joined by Harvard Law professor <a href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/index.html?id=604">Jed Shugerman</a> and Yale historian Beverly Gage to discuss the Affordable Care Act arguments at the Supreme Court, what might happen if the law gets struck down, and the pros, cons, and history of judicial elections.</p>
<p>Here are some of the links and references mentioned during this week's show:</p>
<p>Supreme Court <a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts.aspx">transcripts</a> from all three days of argument.<br /> <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s <a href="http://www.slate.com/topics/o/obamacare.html">full coverage</a> of the Obamacare challenge.<br /> Emily’s <a href="http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/411273/march-28-2012/march-28--2012---pt--2">appearance</a> on <em>The Colbert Report</em> discussing the health care arguments.<br /> Adam Liptak’s <em>New York Times </em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/us/politics/at-center-of-health-care-fight-roscoe-filburns-1942-commerce-case.html?pagewanted=all">piece</a> on the parallels between health care and <em>Wickard v. Filburn.<br /> </em>Professor Randy Barnett’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/12/13/a-fatal-blow-to-obamas-health-care-law/an-unconstitutional-commandment">argument</a> that the individual mandate is unconstitutional.<br /> <em><a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15647611274064109718">Gonzales v. Raich</a></em>, a 2005 case on marijuana and the Commerce Clause.<br /> <em><a href="http://www.lawnix.com/cases/lochner-new-york.html">Lochner v. New York</a></em>, a 1905 case concerning maximum work hours.<br /> Conservative judge Jeffrey Sutton’s 6th Circuit <a href="http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/11a0168p-06.pdf">decision</a> upholding the constitutionality of health care.<br /> A Bloomberg <a href="http://go.bloomberg.com/health-care-supreme-court/2012-03-14/exclusive-poll-americans-think-politics-will-influence-justices-health-care-votes-2/">poll</a> finding that 75 percent of Americans believe the Supreme Court’s decision on health care will be influenced by politics.<br /> A <em>New York Times/</em>CBS News <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/us/most-americans-want-health-care-law-overturned-or-changed-poll-finds.html?pagewanted=all">poll</a> finding 85 percent of Americans approve of the requirement that insurance companies cover everyone with pre-existing conditions.<br /> Jay Leno’s <a href="http://www.nbc.com/the-tonight-show/video/mitt-romney/1262892">interview</a> with Mitt Romney, in which he pressed him to come up with alternatives to Obamacare.<br /> Robert Heinlein’s <em><a href="http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B002VA35NG">The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress</a> </em>on Audible.com.<br /> Jed’s book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674055489/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0674055489">The People’s Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America</a>.<br /> </em>Einer Elhauge’s <em>National Law Journal </em><a href="http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202547223062&amp;slreturn=1">article</a> on the Obamacare procedural compromise.</p>
<p>Jed chatters about Mark Oppenheimer’s <strong><em>Slate </em></strong><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2012/03/rep_dave_camp_can_t_order_aide_aharon_friedman_to_give_his_wife_a_jewish_divorce_.html">piece</a> on Rep. Dave Camp and his Orthodox Jewish aide, who refuses to give his wife a religious divorce (which requires a “get” document from the husband releasing the wife).<br /> Beverly chatters about the <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/trending/2012/03/29/zimmerman_video_draws_new_questions_about_trayvon_martin_shooting.html">Trayvon Martin case</a> and the new evidence that has emerged in the past few days.<br /> Emily chatters about how much she enjoyed watching the first season of <em><a href="http://www.hbo.com/game-of-thrones/index.html">Game of Thrones</a></em>.</p>
<p>The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is <a href="mailto:gabfest@slate.com">gabfest@slate.com</a>. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)</p>
<p><strong><em></em>Podcast production by Andrew Bouv&eacute; and Dale Willman. Links compiled by Aviva Shen. </strong></p>Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:03:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2012/03/gabfest_supreme_court_on_obamacare_the_politics_of_the_case_and_judicial_elections_.htmlEmily BazelonBeverly GageJed Handelsman Shugerman2012-03-30T17:03:00ZListen to <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>'s show about the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act arguments, possible political fallout from the decision, and the pros and cons of judicial elections.PodcastsThe Gabfest on the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act Arguments, the Case’s Impact on Politics, and the Pros and Cons of Judicial Elections100120330008obamacareEmily BazelonBeverly GageJed Handelsman ShugermanPolitical Gabfesthttp://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2012/03/gabfest_supreme_court_on_obamacare_the_politics_of_the_case_and_judicial_elections_.htmlfalsefalsefalseThe Gabfest on the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act Arguments, the Case’s Impact on Politics, and the Pros and Cons of Judicial ElectionsThe Gabfest on the Supreme Court’s Affordable Care Act Arguments, the Case’s Impact on Politics, and the Pros and Cons of Judicial Elections“A Drunkard in the Gutter Is Just Where He Ought To Be”http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2012/03/income_inequality_william_graham_sumner_invented_the_gop_s_defense_of_the_rich_in_1883_.html
<p>Last month, Rick Santorum announced that he likes inequality. “There is income inequality in America,” he told the Detroit Economic Club in a much-quoted speech. “There always has been and, hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be.”</p>
<p>Many political observers have since ridiculed this stance, declaring Santorum “unhinged,” or at least unfit to conduct a serious presidential campaign. But the positive defense of inequality is not entirely new in American politics. From the moment that social reformers began to “discover” poverty in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, naysayers were on hand to explain why extremes of wealth and poverty made for a just society. By embracing inequality, Santorum is reviving the politics of our last Gilded Age.</p>
<p>One of the earliest (and most acerbic) champions of inequality was William Graham Sumner, a Yale sociologist and one of the best-known public intellectuals of the late 19<sup>th</sup> century. Sumner started his career as an Episcopal priest, tending to the pastoral needs of a New Jersey flock. Within a few years, however, he concluded that his temperament—famously standoffish and blunt—was better suited to scholarly endeavors. As a professor, he helped to pioneer the new discipline of sociology, coining such lasting terms as <em>ethnocentrism</em> and <em>folkways</em> in his studies of American culture. He also made a name for himself as a staunch anti-imperialist and principled opponent of the Spanish-American War.</p>
<p>But it was in the realm of economic philosophy that Sumner carved out his most controversial and lasting influence. In 1883, he composed a short book-length essay titled “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other.” His answer? Absolutely nothing.</p>
<p>In making his case for <em>laissez-faire, </em>Sumner highlighted one of the enduring paradoxes of American politics. “It is commonly asserted that there are in the United States no classes, and any allusion to classes is resented,” he noted. “On the other hand, we constantly read and hear discussion of social topics in which the existence of social classes is assumed as a simple fact.” This was particularly true of the 1870s, which witnessed a serious financial panic and depression, followed by a major national railroad strike. In response, reformers began to argue for government to take a greater role in aiding the poor and in softening the rough edges of industrial capitalism.</p>
<p>Sumner’s essay rejected all such nonsense. “It is not at all the function of the State to make men happy,” he declared. “They must make themselves happy in their own way, and at their own risk.” Today, he would be called a libertarian. At the time, the term of choice was “Social Darwinist.” One of the more fashionable theories of Gilded Age class relations, Social Darwinism attempted to apply the laws of evolution to human society, and thus to explain why those who ended up on top were necessarily “the fittest” among men.</p>
<p>Sumner was unabashed in his admiration for millionaires, and indignant at criticism lobbed in their direction. “The rich are good-natured,” he insisted, model citizens to be applauded for their initiative and patience with lesser souls. He approved the “aggregation of large fortunes” as “a necessary condition of many forms of social advance.” Toward that end, he argued strenuously against restrictions on Wall Street stockjobbing and other forms of speculative gain. “To denounce financial devices which are useful and legitimate because use is made of them for fraud is ridiculous,” he wrote. Also to be avoided were government investigative commissions, increased taxes, and Sunday-morning haranguing about how the rich owed something to the poor.</p>
<p>All of this offered a portrait of the elite utterly at odds with the Gilded Age stereotype: Rich men were virtuous, not “wicked”; self-disciplined, not profligate. Much of the staying power of Sumner’s arguments came from his ability to describe the class divide in cultural rather than economic terms. On one side were the virtuous rich, guardians of liberty and individual ambition. On the other were a host of interlopers seeking to drain wealthy entrepreneurs of their creativity, freedom, and resources. “If you get wealth, you will have to support other people,” he complained. “[I]f you do not get wealth, it will be the duty of other people to support you.” Call it the politics of resentment, 19<sup>th</sup>-century style.</p>
<p>Sumner’s list of deadbeats and drags on society will be familiar to any casual observer of modern conservative politics. First were the social reformers (usually well-educated Northeasterners, preferably women), whom Sumner chastised for their arrogance, hypocrisy, and dangerous utopian schemes. Next came government bureaucrats, typified by the “obscure clerk” whose small-minded enforcement of rules threatened to crush the nation’s visionary spirits. Finally, there were the poor themselves—often “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.” “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be,” Sumner argued with his trademark bluntness. He even went so far as to denounce democracy itself, viewing mass voting as a modern experiment perilously close to mob rule.</p>
<p>Ultimately, though, it was neither the rich nor the poor who were the greatest objects of Sumner’s concern. Even as he cheered the richest of the rich, he positioned himself as the champion of a far more humble social figure, an ordinary taxpayer-citizen dubbed the “Forgotten Man.” In Sumner’s formulation, the “Forgotten Man” was the backbone of American society, the sort of fellow who “watched his own investments, made his own machinery safe, attended to his own plumbing, and educated his own children.” It was this earthy taxpayer-citizen—not the wealthiest Americans—who truly stood to suffer under a regime of government regulation and social reform. “He is an obscure man,” Sumner explained. Moreover, this hidden figure was usually too busy or too disgusted to engage in political debate. “He might grumble sometimes to his wife,” Sumner wrote, “but he does not frequent the grocery, and he does not talk politics at the tavern. So he is forgotten.”</p>
<p>This image of the overlooked law-abiding citizen has since become a staple of American political rhetoric—and one that conveniently declares the mass of voters in secret agreement with any given set of ideals. In the 1930s, as historian Amity Shlaes has noted, New Dealers adopted the idea of a “Forgotten Man” to promote reforms such as Social Security and labor rights. In the decades since, the figure has mostly reverted back to its conservative origins. In 1969, journalist Peter Schrag identified the “forgotten American” as a white working-class man “alienated” by the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. “He does all the right things,” Schrag wrote, “obeys the law, goes to church and insists—usually—that his kids get a better education than he had.” That same year, Richard Nixon tweaked the idea to come up with his “Silent Majority.”</p>
<p>Today’s Republican candidates have yet to coin such catchy slogans. But they have already put at least part of Sumner’s original approach to work. As a political thinker, Sumner’s chief contribution lay neither in his praise for the rich, nor his lament for the Forgotten Man, but in his attempt to combine the two. For better or worse, he offered a model for resolving the great conundrum of modern Republican politics: how to champion the wealthy while claiming to speak for the unsung middle class.</p>Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:15:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2012/03/income_inequality_william_graham_sumner_invented_the_gop_s_defense_of_the_rich_in_1883_.htmlBeverly Gage2012-03-29T11:15:00ZMeet the man who invented the GOP’s defense of the wealthy—in 1883.LifeMeet the Man Who Invented the GOP’s Defense of the Wealthy—in 1883100120329003income inequalityincome inequalityincome inequalityBeverly GageHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2012/03/income_inequality_william_graham_sumner_invented_the_gop_s_defense_of_the_rich_in_1883_.htmlfalsefalsefalseMeet the Man Who Invented the GOP’s Defense of the Wealthy—in 1883Meet the Man Who Invented the GOP’s Defense of the Wealthy—in 1883The Warren J. Samuels Portrait Collection/Duke University.William Graham Sumner defended income inequality, as Rick Santorum recently hasRadical Solutions to Economic Inequalityhttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/02/income_inequality_the_government_had_better_ideas_for_fixing_it_100_years_ago.html
<p>A century ago, in one of his last acts of office, President William Howard Taft attempted to solve the problem of inequality in America. In August 1912, on the cusp of a brutal third-place finish in the presidential election, he created a Commission on Industrial Relations to investigate “the general condition of labor in the principal industries.” Despite its fusty charge, the commission turned out to be one of the most sensational sideshows of the Progressive Era, a cross-country journey through the wilds of American class conflict. For three years, government commissioners traipsed from city to city asking capitalists, union organizers, and reformers what it was like to work in America, and whether the spoils of industry seemed to be distributed fairly among the rich and poor.&nbsp;</p>
<p>The commission’s answer, released in a 1916 report, speaks volumes about the persistent dilemma of inequality in the United States, and about the intellectual timidity of today’s political responses. “Have the workers received a fair share of the enormous increase in wealth which has taken place in this country…?” the report demanded. “The answer is emphatically—No!”<br /> </p>
<p>Their numbers bore this out. According to the commission, the “Rich”—or top 2 percent—owned 60 percent of the nation’s wealth. By contrast, the “Poor”—or bottom 60 percent—owned just 5 percent of the wealth.</p>
<p>Today, after a century of ups and down, we’ve landed back at those extremes, give or take a few percentage points. But what’s striking about the commission’s report, read from a 21<sup>st</sup>-century perspective, is how limited our own debate about inequality seems by comparison. For the commission, inequality was a fundamental problem that threatened the entire fabric of American democracy. Today, by contrast, we’re busy debating whether a multimillionaire like Mitt Romney ought to pay a few more percentage points in federal taxes.<br /> </p>
<p>The driving force behind the commission’s creation in 1912 was, to put it bluntly, fear: If something wasn’t done, even tepid progressives agreed, the country was looking at a period of sustained social chaos, or worse. Evidence of a broken system seemed to be everywhere and went far beyond the sorts of peaceful protests and encampments that have roiled today’s 1 percent. On the West Coast, the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers were blowing up nonunion bridges and work sites. On the East Coast, the radical Industrial Workers of the World were actually winning strikes. In New York in 1914, thousands of people turned out for a rally in Union Square to mourn the deaths of three anarchists who had blown themselves up attempting to build a bomb aimed at John D. Rockefeller Jr., the country’s richest man.</p>
<p>To capture what this all looked like from the top, the commission turned to the words of Daniel Guggenheim, one of dozens of industrial titans asked to weigh in at its public hearings. In a decidedly un-Romney-esque concession, Guggenheim thanked his lucky stars that labor organizers and government reformers had stepped in to help where capitalism had failed. “If it is not for what has been done and what is being done,” he concluded, “we would have revolution in this country.”<br /> </p>
<p>The depth of violence and anxiety about class revolt is one of the most striking differences between then and now. What’s just as remarkable, though, is the commission’s willingness to engage a vast range of opinion on the subject. The “great men” of the day—Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford—showed up to testify at commission hearings. But so did hundreds of reformers, organizers, and ordinary laborers, all invited to speak under official government auspices, and all with their own ideas about how to fix a broken system<em>.</em></p>
<p>The most controversial witness was William D. “Big Bill” Haywood, general secretary of the IWW. Less than a decade earlier, Haywood had been on trial for conspiring to murder the governor of Idaho in the midst of a bitter union war. During his testimony in 1915, the commission listened patiently as Haywood explained that workers would continue to fight regardless of what the commission might do, and “of anything that capitalists and their shareholders and stockholders may say to the contrary.” Imagine the federal government inviting Noam Chomsky to weigh in on American class relations at an official hearing, throw in a murder charge and a series of mass revolts, and you have some idea of how just how ambitious the commission’s experiment in democracy really was.<br /> </p>
<p>Haywood’s testimony marked the high point of Americans’ willingness to entertain radical solutions to the inequality problem. By 1917, the country was at war; by 1918 Haywood was on trial for criticizing the draft. But what the commission did in its final report was radical in its own way. Despite divisions among its members, the commission insisted that the growing divide between rich and poor was more than an economic problem. Wealth inequality, the final report concluded, struck at the heart of American democracy, threatening to undermine the national ideal that hard work would bring just reward.</p>
<p>There is something almost quaint—but decidedly refreshing—about the commissioners’ blunt language. “Effective action by Congress is required…,” the report proclaimed, “to check the growth of an hereditary aristocracy, which is foreign to every conception of American Government and menacing to the welfare of the people and the existence of the Nation as a democracy.” Far from debating whether “corporations are people,” the commission took for granted that concentrations of corporate power were undemocratic, that gigantic fortunes “constitute a menace to the State,” and that it was the duty of government to restore a balance of power.<br /> </p>
<p>How did they plan to do it? The commission offered two chief solutions, neither one of which has won much of an airing in our latest rounds of debate. The first was an inheritance tax, aimed not at the fearless entrepreneur, but at his sons and daughters, who had done nothing to deserve a fortune. The second was increased support for union organizing, on the principle that workers deserved to elect their own representatives on the job just as they did in the government.</p>
<p>&nbsp;Both of these ideas ultimately became law—the inheritance tax almost immediately, union organizing rights in fits and starts over the next few decades. Today, by contrast, we seem to be going in the opposite direction, with unions under attack and the so-called “death tax” all but moribund as a political issue.</p>
<p>The partisan stalemate in Washington suggests that situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. But today’s lawmakers could do worse than to follow the Industrial Commission’s broader example of democratic debate. The national conversation about inequality is already underway. The least they could do is listen.</p>Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:50:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/02/income_inequality_the_government_had_better_ideas_for_fixing_it_100_years_ago.htmlBeverly Gage2012-02-15T11:50:00ZIf only Americans today were as open-minded about leveling the playing field as we were 100 years ago.News and PoliticsThe Government Had Better Ideas for Fixing Income Inequality 100 Years Ago100120215003income inequalityBeverly GageHistoryhttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/02/income_inequality_the_government_had_better_ideas_for_fixing_it_100_years_ago.htmlfalsefalsefalseThe Government Had Better Ideas for Fixing Income Inequality 100 Years AgoThe Government Had Better Ideas for Fixing Income Inequality 100 Years AgoUnited States Library of CongressWilliam Howard Taft, 27th President of the United States and 10th Chief Justice of the United States.Internal Affairshttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/life_and_art/2011/11/clint_eastwood_s_j_edgar_were_j_edgar_hoover_and_clyde_tolson_lovers_.html
<p>In one of the climactic moments of the new film <em><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2011/11/j_edgar_reviewed_clint_eastwood_directs_leonardo_dicaprio_in_a_j_edgar_hoover_movie.html">J. Edgar</a></em>, a thirtysomething J. Edgar Hoover reveals his plans to take a wife. The scene unfolds in a New York hotel suite, where Hoover has reserved adjoining rooms with Clyde Tolson, his second-in-command at the FBI. Tolson responds with rage to his boss’s news, throwing a temper tantrum at odds with his typically polished demeanor. The argument soon escalates into a fistfight, then into the film’s single most sexual moment: a bloody kiss between the director and associate director of the FBI.</p>
<p>There is no evidence that this fight—much less the kiss—ever took place. What we know about the relationship between Hoover and Tolson comes mostly from the public record:<strong> </strong>meals together twice a day, joint vacations, a final burial place just a few yards apart. Their interior and sexual lives remain mostly a matter of speculation. Despite daunting research efforts by journalists and historians, we can say little more today than we could four or five decades ago: Hoover and Tolson had a marriage of sorts. But what sort of marriage was it?</p>
<p><em>J. Edgar</em>’s scriptwriter, Dustin Lance Black, had the luxury of imagining the answer to this question, depicting Hoover and Tolson’s relationship as a tragic precursor to today’s sanctioned gay marriages.<em> </em>The film<em> </em>focuses on their interpersonal drama, conjuring up intimate dinner-table powwows and anguished personal struggles. (For the record: Yes, Hoover loved his mama. No, there is no evidence that he put on her necklace and dress in the hours after her death.)</p>
<p>And yet it is Hoover and Tolson’s public life—the stuff we <em>do </em>know about—that is ultimately the most fascinating part of their story. They never openly acknowledged a sexual or romantic relationship. At the same time, they demanded—and received—a level of respect for their partnership that seems almost unthinkable in pre-Stonewall society. For some four decades, the cr&egrave;me de la cr&egrave;me of political America treated them as a recognized couple; when Edgar was invited to dinner, so was Clyde. We don’t have to make up their most intimate scenes to find a relationship worth exploring.<br /> <br /> Hoover and Tolson met sometime in the late 1920s—perhaps, though not definitively, at the Mayflower Hotel bar as suggested in one of <em>J. Edgar’s</em> early scenes. In early 1928, Tolson signed on as a Bureau agent, one of many handsome young George Washington fraternity men recruited in Hoover’s early days as director. His career took off immediately. By 1931, Tolson was assistant director of the Bureau, charged with enforcing Hoover’s famously nitpicking internal policies.</p>
<p>Swift promotion was not particularly unique at the early Bureau; when Hoover found men he liked, he brought them up fast. What made Tolson stand out was the highly public friendship he soon developed with his boss. By the mid-1930s, Tolson was at Hoover’s side for every major Washington outing, from Bureau baseball games to White House affairs. As the FBI gained fame for running down kidnappers and bank robbers (a story rendered almost wholly out of chronological sequence in <em>J. Edgar</em>),<em> </em>Tolson usually accompanied Hoover to New York as well. There, they became fixtures of gossip columnist Walter Winchell’s rarefied Stork Club circle, hobnobbing with the likes of boxer Jack Dempsey and Broadway author <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0141186720/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=217145&amp;creative=399369&amp;creativeASIN=0141186720">Damon Runyon</a>. On one fairly typical night in 1935, they joined Winchell in the press section at a Dempsey fight only to end the evening watching a brawl involving Ernest Hemingway.</p>
<p>Their own brawl in <em>J. Edgar </em>takes places sometime during this period, evoking the erotically charged world of caf&eacute; society as a backdrop for Hoover and Tolson’s grand confrontation. Many of the scene’s other elements are similarly based in fact. Hoover did have a headline-grabbing and certainly false romance with film star Dorothy Lamour, his candidate for wifehood in <em>J. Edgar</em>. He also had a rumored—and equally unlikely—affair with Ginger Rogers’ mother Lela, depicted as the confident older woman trying to muscle Hoover onto the dance floor in one of the film’s nightclub scenes.</p>
<p>For the most part, though, Hoover simply opted out of the marriage-and-children game. He loved to give advice on the subject, publishing preachy newspaper columns and speeches on “The Parent Problem” and “The Man I Want My Son To Be.” But he never seriously entertained the idea of starting a family, and his few dates with women seem to be nothing more than a nod to social convention. In retrospect, it seems astonishing how little he actually did to maintain a heterosexual facade. From his first moments at the Bureau, he surrounded himself with young men, and his loyalties never wavered.</p>
<p>This produced the predictable Washington gossip. As early as the 1930s, local columnists had begun to titter about Hoover’s “mincing step” and fondness for natty suits. By the late 1960s, at least one congressman was allegedly threatening to out Hoover and Tolson on the House floor, retaliation for unrelated backroom shenanigans. Hoover could be merciless in such situations. Throughout his career, he regularly sent FBI agents to track down citizens unwise enough to suggest that he was “queer.” He also cooperated in the postwar Lavender Scare, when hundreds of gay men and women lost their federal jobs as security risks. (Oddly, <em>J. Edgar </em>entirely skips this period of Hoover’s life, despite its jaw-droppingly rich sexual complexity.)</p>
<p>Hoover’s attempts to strong-arm his critics fit our image of him as a ruthless power-monger, and of the pre-Stonewall era as a time of brutal anti-gay repression. Far more difficult to reconcile with this image is the acceptance that Hoover and Tolson seemed to find—at exactly the same time—in the highest reaches of New York and Washington society. Despite the rumors of their homosexuality, they conducted a vibrant and open social partnership throughout their years together, accepting joint dinner invitations, attending family functions, even signing the occasional thank-you note together.</p>
<p>Friends and political associates knew to treat them as a bona fide couple. In the 1930s, for instance, Hoover and Tolson hit the town with Broadway star Ethel Merman and Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley, busy conducting their own illicit affair. By the 1950s, the two men were double-dating with Dick and Pat Nixon, whom Hoover had met while pursuing the case against Alger Hiss. “I did want to drop you this personal note to let you know how sorry Clyde and I are that we were unable to join Pat and you for lunch today,” Hoover wrote to Vice President Nixon after one failed invitation in 1958. On another occasion, Nixon suggested that Clyde—“our favorite bartender”—ought to learn to make the mean if unspecified pink cocktail that they all had often enjoyed together.</p>
<p>Such exchanges evoke nothing so much as the formal world of 1950s married life, one set of spouses trading entertaining tips and social niceties with the other. But did these friends actually view Hoover and Tolson as a romantic and sexual couple? In recent decades, many acquaintances—including Ethel Merman—have claimed that they “knew” about Hoover and Tolson. But it’s hard to say if this is posthumous speculation or accurate insider knowledge. Nixon famously referred to Hoover as a “cocksucker”—a suggestive word, but one that may or may not be referring to Hoover’s sex life. In the press, Hoover and Tolson were most often described as “bachelors,” a term that served simultaneously as a euphemism and as a straightforward description of an unmarried heterosexual man. At the FBI, acquaintances consistently denied anything other than a close friendship.</p>
<p>It is easy to write off the more open aspects of Hoover and Tolson’s relationship as proof of old-fashioned naivet&eacute;—to assume that folks in the 1950s were unaware. But this gives the people of the past far too little credit and flattens out an intriguing social history. If Hoover’s story tells us anything, it’s that today’s binaries—gay vs. straight, closeted vs. out—map uneasily onto the sexual past. Hoover and Tolson were many things at once: professional associates, golf buddies, Masonic brothers, and possibly lovers as well.</p>
<p>At the very least, they were caring social partners, relying on each other for emotional sustenance and daily support that went beyond the realm of ordinary friendship. <em>J. Edgar </em>closes with Tolson clutching a love letter to Eleanor Roosevelt from journalist Lorena Hickok, now widely seen as one of Roosevelt’s several romantic interests. But Tolson might as well have been reading a letter from his own FBI personnel file, which contains one of the few personal missives that have survived decades of purging and obfuscation.</p>
<p>“Words are mere man-given symbols for thoughts and feelings, and they are grossly insufficient to express the thoughts in my mind and the feelings in my heart that I have for you,” Hoover wrote to Tolson in 1943. “I hope I will always have you beside me.”</p>Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:21:53 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/life_and_art/2011/11/clint_eastwood_s_j_edgar_were_j_edgar_hoover_and_clyde_tolson_lovers_.htmlBeverly Gage2011-11-10T18:21:53ZWere J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson lovers?ArtsWere J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson Lovers?100111110006moviesBeverly GageLife And Arthttp://www.slate.com/articles/arts/life_and_art/2011/11/clint_eastwood_s_j_edgar_were_j_edgar_hoover_and_clyde_tolson_lovers_.htmlfalsefalsefalseBeverly Gage: Were J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson Lovers?Were J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson Lovers?Photograph courtesy UCLA Library.Clyde Tolson and&nbsp;J. Edgar Hoover never openly acknowledged a sexual or romantic relationshipLessons for Occupy Wall Streethttp://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/11/occupy_wall_street_how_how_the_protesters_should_respond_to_esca.html
<p>Last week, the Occupy Wall Street movement entered a new phase. For its first few months, Occupy was all about message, the 99 percent taking a tentative stand against the 1 percent. Now, the on-the-ground challenges of sustaining such a movement over the long term have begun to take center stage.<a></a></p>
<p>The freak East Coast snowstorm answered one challenge question a few weeks early: What will happen to the encampments when the weather turns cold? Apparently they will stay. More ominously, protesters in many cities now face the prospect of sustained police crackdowns, from the hassles of permitting and noise ordinances to the violence that erupted last week in Oakland. There, police used tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets to attack protesters near city hall. One of those bullets fractured the skull of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, leaving him hospitalized in critical condition. Since then, Olsen has become the chief symbol of Occupy’s new reality: Going up against Wall Street, it turns out, is serious business. And the more serious the Occupy movement gets, the more official and near-lethal hostility it's likely to encounter. <br /> </p>
<p>As they sort out what to do next, the Occupiers might take a page from the history of American labor, the only social movement that has ever made a real dent in the nation’s extremes of wealth and poverty. For more than half a century, between the 1870s and the 1930s, labor organizers and strikers regularly faced levels of violence all but unimaginable to modern-day activists. They nonetheless managed to create a movement that changed the nation’s economic institutions and reshaped ideas about wealth, inequality, and Wall Street power. Along the way, they also helped to launch the modern civil liberties ethos, insisting that the fight to tame capitalism went hand in hand with the right to free speech.</p>
<p>The first major national clash between “capital and labor,” in the parlance of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, came with the Great Rail Strike of 1877. That July, railroad workers in Martinsburg, W.Va. protested a pay cut by walking off the job. Within days, rail workers throughout the country joined in, effectively shutting down the nation’s major trade and transit system and inspiring localized general strikes. The authorities responded harshly. In Pittsburgh, the local militia fired on strikers, killing 20 men. By the time the smoke cleared a few weeks later, 80 more protesters across the country had been killed. President Rutherford B. Hayes recorded proudly in his diary that the rail strikers had been “put down by force,” setting the tone for many a future conflict. <br /> </p>
<p>Over the next half-century, the history of American labor came to read like one great catalog of “force”: 10 strikers and three strikebreakers dead in the 1892 Homestead strike; 2,000 federal troops called in to suppress the 1894 Pullman rail strike; up to three dozen killed, including 11 children trapped in a burning tent colony, during the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre">1914 Ludlow Massacre</a>. Not until the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 did the free-for-all violence of the labor wars begin to slow. Even then, it did not stop entirely. In 1937, the Chicago police fired into a crowd of strikers marching on the anti-union Republic Steel corporation, killing 10 men and wounding dozens more—one of the most lethal conflicts of the country’s last great economic crisis.</p>
<p>In response, workers a century ago sometimes gave as good as they got. Though the preponderance of power was always on the side of government, strikers regularly armed in self-defense. A handful of militants went beyond such clashes into acts of sabotage and even terrorism. On Sept. 16, 1920, a still-unknown assailant (most likely the Italian-born anarchist Mario Buda) left a cart loaded with dynamite at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in New York. It went off just after noon, killing 38 people and wounding hundreds in the most dramatic act of anti-Wall Street rebellion in the nation’s history. <br /> </p>
<p>Today’s Wall Street protesters are unlikely to encounter the extremes of police violence that faced workers and radicals in the last Gilded Age. They are even less likely, given their widespread commitment to nonviolence, to respond in kind. Still, the labor wars of the last century contain powerful lessons about what can happen when struggles for economic justice cease to be arguments about ideas, and instead become contests on the ground.</p>
<p>It should be said, for starters, that repression often worked. Guns and jail terms turned out to be remarkably efficient tools for clearing encampments and suppressing strikes. And yet such tactics often had unintended consequences. Labor and radical movements can seize upon incidents of official violence to fuel outrage and publicize their cause. Just as importantly, encounters with police and courts may radicalize initially moderate participants and spectators. Emma Goldman dated her political awakening to the execution of the Haymarket anarchists, charged with advocating violence and inspiring the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair">1886 Haymarket bombing</a>. Socialist leader Eugene Debs attributed his own radicalization to his time in jail after helping to lead the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike">Pullman Strike</a>. <br /> </p>
<p>Even milder forms of official repression frequently served to galvanize rather than dampen labor protest. In 1908, the radical Industrial Workers of the World launched a series of “free speech fights” designed to draw attention to local restrictions on picketing and soapbox oratory. In a typical action, IWW members planted themselves on street corners to read the U.S. Constitution or to point out the many flaws of the American capitalist system. When police swept them up, dozens of others flooded into town to take up the same work, often defying vigilante violence. The effect, in cities such as Spokane and San Diego, was to overcrowd the jails and raise the question of whether or not preventing speech was worth the logistical headache. In at least a few cases, the answer was no, marking an important turning point in civil liberties consciousness.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the IWW’s few early successes were wiped out in the conflagration of World War I, in which the union’s leadership opposed the draft and ended up on mass trial for sedition. But if the Wobblies’ tactics do not provide a model of surefire success, their experiences—like those of the labor movement more broadly—nonetheless speak to the difficulties of mounting a sustained challenge to entrenched institutions, and to the flexibility and creativity that is inevitably required. If there is one lesson for Occupiers to take from the early history of American labor, it is that making real changes in the structures of wealth and power in this country is likely to be a long, hard slog. Chances are, this past week was just the beginning.</p>Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:12:43 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/11/occupy_wall_street_how_how_the_protesters_should_respond_to_esca.htmlBeverly Gage2011-11-02T18:12:43ZTake a cue from the only social movement that has ever made a real dent in the nation’s extremes of wealth and poverty.BusinessHow Occupy Wall Street Should Respond to Escalating Violence100111102010labor movementoccupy wall streetBeverly GageMoneyboxhttp://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/11/occupy_wall_street_how_how_the_protesters_should_respond_to_esca.htmlfalsefalsefalseHow Occupy Wall Street Should Respond to Escalating ViolenceHow Occupy Wall Street Should Respond to Escalating ViolencePhotograph by Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP/Getty Images.Occupy Oakland protesters march near the Oakland City Hall on Oct. 25.The Crazy Eyes Gabfesthttp://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2011/08/the_crazy_eyes_gabfest.html
<p> <strong><em>Become a fan of the <u><a href="http://www.facebook.com/gabfest">Political Gabfest on Facebook</a></u>. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there.</em></strong></p>
<p><strong><em>To listen to the discussion, use the player below or <a href="http://player.podtrac.com/player?autoplay=true&amp;text=Play+Now&amp;mode=single&amp;rgb=660033&amp;h=300&amp;episode=http%3a%2f%2ffeedproxy.google.com%2f%7er%2fSlatePoliticalGabfest%2f%7e5%2fi8uPZYmn7-k%2fSG11081201_Gabfest.mp3&amp;title=Slate%3a+The+Crazy+Eyes+Gabfest&amp;type=link&amp;feed=http%3a%2f%2ffeeds.feedburner.com%2fSlatePoliticalGabfest">open this player in another tab</a>.</em></strong></p>
<p><em></em></p>
<p>We're designing new Gabfest T-shirts, and we need your help! Send your ideas for a logo and tagline to <a href="mailto:gabfest@slate.com">gabfest@slate.com</a>, or post a note on our <a href="http://www.facebook.com/gabfest">Facebook page</a>.</p>
<p>On this week's <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> Political Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and special guest Yale history professor Beverly Gage discuss the Republican presidential debate, liberals losing faith in President Obama, and the current economic turmoil.</p>
<p>Here are some of the links and references mentioned during this week's show: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>John's <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2301419/">piece</a> on this week's GOP presidential debate in Iowa.<br />A <em>Politico</em> <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61111.html">piece</a> on Mitt Romney's claim during the debate that &quot;corporations are people.&quot;<br />The &quot;crazy-eyed&quot; Michele Bachmann <em>Newsweek</em> <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/08/07/michele-bachmann-tea-party-queen-for-america.html">cover</a> released this week. <br />Ryan Lizza's <em>New Yorker</em> <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/15/110815fa_fact_lizza">profile</a> of Michele Bachmann.<br />A <em>New York Times</em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/us/politics/13donate.html">piece</a> on Rick Perry, who is expected to enter the GOP presidential race on Saturday.<br />Drew Westen's <em>New York Times</em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/what-happened-to-obamas-passion.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all">op-ed</a> on how President Obama has lost his passion since Inauguration Day.<br />Jonathan Chait's <em>New Republic</em> <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/93323/drew-westens-nonsense">piece</a> responding to Westen's op-ed.<br />A <em>New York Times</em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/business/financial-aftershocks-with-precedent-in-history.html?hp">piece</a> on how this week's economic &quot;aftershock&quot; is similar to what happened in the 1930s.<br />Beverly chatters on a recent <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/crime-scene/post/judge-orders-nixon-grand-jury-testimony-unsealed/2011/07/29/gIQA5NHJhI_blog.html">court order</a> to unseal Richard Nixon's grand jury testimony.<br />Emily chatters on the <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/trending/2011/08/11/should_bert_and_ernie_marry_.html">debate</a> over whether Bert and Ernie should get married.<br />John chatters on the book <em> <a href="http://www.happinesshypothesis.com/">The Happiness Hypothesis</a></em>by Jonathan Haidt.<br />The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is <a href="mailto:gabfest@slate.com">gabfest@slate.com</a>. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.) </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Posted on Aug. 12 by John Griffith at 5:21 p.m.</p>
<p><em>Like <strong>Slate </strong>on </em> <a href="http://www.facebook.com/slate"><em>Facebook</em></a><em>. Follow the Gabfest on </em><em> <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/slategabfest">Twitter</a></em><em>.</em></p>Fri, 12 Aug 2011 21:22:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2011/08/the_crazy_eyes_gabfest.htmlEmily BazelonJohn DickersonBeverly Gage2011-08-12T21:22:00ZListen to Slate's show about the Republican presidential debate, liberals losing faith in President Obama, and the current economic turmoil.PodcastsThe Gabfest on the Republican presidential debate, liberals losing faith in President Obama, and the current economic turmoil.2300029Emily BazelonJohn DickersonBeverly GagePolitical Gabfesthttp://www.slate.com/id/2300029falsefalsefalseThe Gabfest on the Republican presidential debate, liberals losing faith in President Obama, and the current economic turmoil.The Gabfest on the Republican presidential debate, liberals losing faith in President Obama, and the current economic turmoil.The Rockefellers and the Angry Commonershttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2007/10/the_rockefellers_and_the_angry_commoners.html
<p> Former Citigroup chairman Sanford Weill thinks that John D. Rockefeller had it good. &quot;I once thought how lucky the Carnegies and Rockefellers were because they made their money before there was an income tax,&quot; Weill <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/15gilded.html?ex=1343880000&amp;en=a3f3a1c5d86d6713&amp;ei=5124&amp;partner=permalink&amp;exprod=permalink">told</a> the <em>New York Times</em>' Louis Uchitelle in July. &quot;I felt that everything of any great consequence was really all made in the past.&quot;</p>
<p>Imagine Weill's surprise, then, to discover himself occupying an economic world that more and more resembles Rockefeller's. According to the most recent statistics, the richest .01 percent of Americans—the almost 15,000 families in Weill's peer group—now take home a full 5 percent of the nation's income. At least the poorest 20 percent, by contrast, some 60 million people, make do with about the same. The last time the concentration of income at the top was this extreme, according to economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, was in the 1910s and 1920s, when tycoons like Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie were at or near the height of their power. And most of the recent increase in inequality has taken place in just the past few decades. Sometime between the tech boom and the subprime-lending crisis, according to a growing legion of social commentators and a slew of recent articles (including Uchitelle's), the United States entered a &quot;new Gilded Age.&quot;</p>
<p>Technically, the 1910s and 1920s fall outside what historians describe as the Gilded Age, roughly the period between the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and Theodore Roosevelt's 1901 ascendance to the presidency (thanks to an assassin's bullet). But the &quot;new Gilded Age&quot; is less a measure of the past than a comment on the present. What it suggests, in its baldest formulation, is that the mega-rich have been growing ever-mega-richer while the rest of us have whiled away our time worrying about health-care deductibles and 3 percent raises. </p>
<p>Viewed purely in terms of the statistics on inequality, the recycling of the Gilded Age moniker makes a certain amount of sense. The term also has a nice political edge for liberal critics: What's next, it implies, the repeal of those pesky child-labor laws? But numbers get us only so far in understanding how inequality actually played out for the first great generation of corporate tycoons such as Carnegie and Rockefeller. </p>
<p>A century ago, the &quot;class question&quot;—who would control industrial profits, who would set wages, whether capitalism was even compatible with democracy—was at the forefront of American politics, the impetus for mass uprisings, partisan warfare, and, for some, the hope of full-blown revolution. Even at the height of Social Darwinism (which, like inequality, seems to be making a comeback), industrial titans lived with an acute awareness that the poor were not altogether pleased with their lot, and that they might one day soon do something serious to change it. Today, by comparison, the inequality debate is positively polite, as if the gap between rich and poor were a minor matter to be considered by statisticians and policy-makers.</p>
<p>The apparent statistical similarity between the two periods often masks what's unique about today's inequality crisis. Take labor organizing, for instance. Today, unions represent approximately 8 percent of the private-sector work force—about the same percentage as a century ago. But labor's political fortunes could hardly be more different. At the turn of the last century, unions were on their way up, a rise that would lead to the passage of landmark federal labor legislation in the 1930s. By contrast, if current trends continue (as they probably will), private-sector unions will be all but extinct in the United States within the next few decades. In the chasm between these two political realities—between an era when class revolution seemed genuinely possible and an era when expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit seems like a pipe dream—lies the answer to that anguished query of today's progressive: How did we end up <em>here</em>? </p>
<p>A century ago, even the richest men in America could not escape concerns over impending class conflict. John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the original John D., tried mightily—and failed. Largely a philanthropist rather than an industrialist, Rockefeller Jr. worked throughout his early life to tidy up his father's reputation, helping most notably to establish the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913. </p>
<p>The following year, however, his father's chickens came home to roost. In the spring of 1914, armed guards at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. fired on striking workers and then set fire to their tents, killing 11 children and two women cowering in a pit below. The Rockefeller family, the press soon revealed, owned a controlling interest in the company's stock, and Rockefeller Jr. sat on the board. The outcry was instantaneous. &quot;Mr. Rockefeller is the monster of capitalism,&quot; Helen Keller (a socialist as well as a hero to the disabled) told reporters, according to Ron Chernow's <em>Titan</em>. &quot;He gives charity and in the same breath he permits the helpless workmen, their wives and children to be shot down.&quot;</p>
<p>In the months that followed, protesters held regular vigils in front of Rockefeller's Standard Oil offices, his 54<sup>th</sup> Street mansion, and his country estate in Tarrytown, N.Y., demanding that he condemn the murders and respect their right to free speech. When he failed to heed their pleas, a few prepared to deliver a less subtle message. On July 4, 1914, three New York anarchists accidentally blew themselves up in a Lexington Avenue tenement while allegedly preparing a bomb to assassinate the &quot;tyrant of Ludlow.&quot;</p>
<p>Rockefeller Jr.'s first instinct was to lash out against his critics. &quot;There was no Ludlow massacre,&quot; he wrote in a private memo, according to Chernow. &quot;While this loss of life is profoundly to be regretted, it is unjust in the extreme to lay it at the door of the defenders of law and property.&quot; </p>
<p>Rockefeller Jr. changed his stance, however, after consulting with Ivy Lee, a public relations strategist (these were pioneering times for the P.R. industry, too). Called the following year to testify about the affair before the Commission on Industrial Relations, he adopted a conciliatory tone, promising that he was moderating his social views. He also tentatively offered CFI workers the right to join a company-controlled union, a scheme known as the Rockefeller Plan. Even his father, who abhorred any concession to labor, took pains to ameliorate his image by the 1920s. Possibly on Lee's advice, he began to hand out dimes to poor children.</p>
<p>Both father and son performed other, more substantive good works as well, of course, establishing not only the Rockefeller Foundation, but also the Rockefeller Institute, Riverside Church, and the University of Chicago, among other institutions. Many of today's CEOs-turned-philanthropists look to such accomplishments as models of philanthropic behavior. As they do so, however, it's important to understand that this earlier generation turned to philanthropy at least in part as a matter of self-defense. Indeed, measured against the political pressures facing the tycoons of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century, the charitable activities of the <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2159774/"><em>Slate </em>60</a> seem decidedly selfless: They are giving away their fortunes even though nobody is threatening their lives. </p>
<p>On the other hand, as this recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/magazine/14wallstreet-t.html?ex=1350014400&amp;en=881bf5f6887d9d7c&amp;ei=5124&amp;partner=permalink&amp;exprod=permalink"><em>New York Times </em>magazine</a> and <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E0D91639F935A35753C1A9619C8B63">other articles</a> show, the new rich are also spending their money on $40 million Manhattan apartments and $120,000 birthday parties for their kids. The <em>Times</em> package, like much of the reporting on the rich of the new Gilded Age, smacks vaguely of voyeurism. (&quot;Econ porn,&quot; you might call it.) More importantly, the attention being lavished on the ways of the contemporary rich misses a larger point about our current politics of inequality. </p>
<p>The real question of today's Gilded Age, highlighted by the comparison to its predecessor, is not why the rich became rich, or whether they behave well with their billions. It's why the rest of us seem to feel we can do so little about it.</p>Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:45:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2007/10/the_rockefellers_and_the_angry_commoners.htmlBeverly Gage2007-10-19T16:45:00ZA century ago, the super-rich had to contend with class warfare.News and PoliticsThe Rockefellers and class warfare.2176203Beverly GageHistory Lessonhttp://www.slate.com/id/2176203falsefalsefalseThe Rockefellers and class warfare.The Rockefellers and class warfare.John D. Rockefeller Jr.Old Soldiers Never Liehttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/tv_week/2007/09/old_soldiers_never_lie.html
<p> In the final moments of <em>The War, </em> the new miniseries by Ken Burns, the camera gazes out over a country horizon at sunset. Lilting in the background are the soft chords of a solo piano, accompanied by the murmur of crickets. Then, the husky voice of pop stylist Norah Jones eases in. &quot;For those who think they have nothing to share,&quot; she sings as the faces of World War II veterans and their families begin to flash across the screen, &quot;Who feel there are no heroes there …&quot; After some two minutes of plaintive photographs, the film closes with Jones in a last patriotic refrain. &quot;America, America,&quot; she sobs, &quot;I gave my best for you.&quot;</p>
<p>This is fantastically sentimental stuff—filmmaker Ken Burns at his most indulgent. Even worse, it's pretty effective. Since his triumph in 1990 with <em>The Civil War, </em>Burns has a made an art out of wringing tears and sighs from a nation whose lack of interest in history ranks among its most salient characteristics. Now, 17 years to the day since PBS broadcast <em>The Civil War, </em>he returns this Sunday night with <em>The War, </em>a sprawling account of the American experience in World War II. At 14 and a half hours, <em>The War</em> is a whopper of a film, and often revelatory. It is also manipulative, nostalgic, and nationalistic. Imagine that Burns had narrated <em>The Civil War</em> solely from the Union perspective, and you'll have a sense of both what's right and what's wrong with this latest epic: It's rousing and meaningful and not technically inaccurate, but not exactly the whole truth. </p>
<p>Burns readily admits that <em>The War </em>is neither a complete nor balanced account of World War II. &quot;The Second World War was fought in thousands of places, too many for any one accounting,&quot; reads the opening screen of each episode. &quot;This is the story of four American towns and how their citizens experienced that war.&quot; He means this quite literally. <em>The War </em>showcases a handful of lively, eloquent Americans from four disparate towns—Waterbury, Conn.; Sacramento, Calif.; Mobile, Ala.; and Luverne, Minn. The series contains no identifiable historical experts. (Though cultural historians Paul Fussell and Sam Hynes appear frequently, they are also veterans and are identified only as &quot;infantry&quot; and &quot;Marine pilot.&quot;) <em>The War</em> offers no commentary from the German or Japanese side, or even from the British or Canadians. Indeed, apart from a few necessary mentions to move the plot along, the film<em></em>says little about Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Hirohito, Churchill, FDR, or any of the other national leaders who presided over the worst catastrophe of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. </p>
<p>What <em>The War</em> provides instead is a harrowing portrait of war from the bottom up, as described by worried siblings, imprisoned civilians, and others who had little control over its direction. Burns focuses on the experiences of front-line soldiers—&quot;our boys,&quot; in the anxious words of home front observers—who found themselves caught up in the &quot;meat grinder&quot; of national service. The film<em></em>opens with the story of Glenn Frazier, an Alabama teenager who joined the Army after a fight with his girlfriend but just before the attack at Pearl Harbor. In vignettes scattered throughout the next seven episodes, <em>The War</em> follows Frazier through defeat in the Philippines, the horror of the Bataan Death March, and three unspeakable years as a prisoner of war in Japan.</p>
<p>Burns and his team show a particular knack for finding stories that highlight the disjuncture between battlefield wretchedness and the relatively normal lives of Americans at home. Among the most affecting is that of &quot;Babe&quot; Ciarlo, an Italian-American draftee who wrote cheerful notes home while battling for his life in the Anzio campaign. True to form, Burns milks Ciarlo's story for all it's worth, juxtaposing letter after letter (&quot;We are having beautiful weather&quot;; &quot;I'm glad that you're going down to the beach with the babies&quot;; &quot;I'm all right—nothing ever happens here&quot;) with graphic footage of rifle fire whizzing through the Italian countryside, mortars blowing farmhouse-sized holes in the fields, corpses decomposing in ditches, and medics binding up awful wounds.</p>
<p>In its fascination with the blood and guts of combat, <em>The War</em> is like a nonfiction <em>Saving Private Ryan</em>:<em></em>a sickening run of violence leavened by tales of individual heroism and courage. (Lest we fail to draw the connection, Tom Hanks himself reads the words of Al McIntosh, a small-town Minnesota newspaper editor who serves as the film's Greek chorus.) <em>The War</em> is less interested in parsing geopolitics than in exploring this experience of battle as window into the human soul. &quot;The greatest cataclysm in history grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions: anger and arrogance and bigotry, victimhood and the lust for power,&quot; the film's narrator explains of the war's origins. &quot;And it ended because other human qualities: courage and perseverance and selflessness, faith, leadership and the hunger for freedom combined with unimaginable brutality to change the course of human events.&quot; </p>
<p>As to which social and political systems might lead people to choose one set of actions over another, <em>The War</em> is decidedly mum. This emphasis on feeling, rather than analysis, is the key to Burns' style. Though often described as a historian, or documentarian, Burns prefers to call himself an &quot;emotional archaeologist&quot;; he wants to know how the past felt, not how it happened. His approach often makes for great viewing: Who wouldn't be devastated to learn that Ciarlo's mother, believing his promises that &quot;I'm doing good, and always happy,&quot; spent years fruitlessly scanning the newspapers for evidence that he had, in fact, survived? &quot;Emotional archaeology&quot; does not, however, always make for unimpeachable history. </p>
<p>The problem with relying so heavily on memory and emotion is that they are often unreliable guides to the past. When asked to recount what their hometowns were like before the war, the residents of Waterbury, Mobile, Sacramento, and Luverne describe idylls free from social conflict: &quot;Everybody knew pretty much everybody,&quot; &quot;we had a wonderful neighborhood,&quot; &quot;all ethnic groups were just perfect,&quot; &quot;it was a wonderful way to grow up.&quot; In the world of <em>The War</em>, there are no Democrats and Republicans, everyone stood loyally behind FDR, and the Depression barely put a dent in American optimism.</p>
<p>This tendency to view the home front through the gauzy lens of nostalgia is one of the film's weakest points. Burns addresses racial segregation and Japanese internment at some length, condemning both as great contradictions in a war for democracy. Even here, though, the sins of the past are filtered and softened for the present. Everyone interviewed laments such practices as moral errors—an admirable consensus suited to 2007. More dubiously, they almost all remember feeling that way in the 1940s. This is where a few more expert voices might have come in handy. Burns often mocks historians as dry, unimaginative hacks, people who would prefer to hand you a phone book filled with raw data than to compose an engaging narrative. Leaving aside the general merits of this criticism, in the case of <em>The War</em>, a touch of big-picture expertise might have made the narrative more interesting, rather than less. </p>
<p>Historian John Dower, for instance, has written eloquently of the differences between the Pacific and European theaters, describing how Americans' racialized ideas of Oriental savagery sanctioned battlefield practices—cutting off the ears of enemy dead, for instance—mostly lacking in the campaign against Germany. <em>The War</em> portrays the brutality of the Pacific War—in one scene, the film quotes late memoirist Eugene Sledge as he describes a fellow American chopping out the gold teeth of a wounded, but still living, Japanese soldier. Without more context, though, we're left to understand such actions merely as evidence of war's generic degradation. </p>
<p>With choices like this, <em>The War</em>, despite its graphic footage and remarkable personal testimony, is a relatively safe film, unlikely to offend anyone's political sensibility. Although Burns successfully undermines the bloodless &quot;good war&quot; myth—after 14 hours, he amply demonstrates that World War II was, in his words, &quot;the worst war ever&quot;—he happily affirms the popular image of a selfless and unsurpassed &quot;Greatest Generation.&quot; At times, Burns seems almost envious of that generation's opportunities for heroism and sacrifice. After 9/11, he pointed out during a preview screening in Waterbury, &quot;we were asked to do nothing. We were asked to go shopping.&quot;</p>
<p>The film ends rather incongruously, not with an assessment of how those sacrifices shaped the global balance of power in the 1940s but with the somber declaration, &quot;A thousand veterans of The War die everyday.&quot; The effect is vaguely guilt-inducing: After all they've done for us, now we're just going to let them <em>die</em>? The intent, however, is more practical. Among their other goals, Burns and PBS hope to encourage Americans to interview their grandparents and great-grandparents and to send the recollections to the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project to be stored for posterity.</p>
<p>It's here, in the intimacies of family dynamics and generational memory, that <em>The War </em>is likely to have its greatest impact. Even the most innocuous relative or neighbor, the film reminds us, may contain untold depths: Perhaps that retired trucker survived the Bataan Death March, perhaps that insurance man was shot down over France. </p>
<p>The film shows just how deep the trauma of war penetrated into the lives of these men and women, and how little most of them have ever said about it. Some 60 years later, Olga Ciarlo still cries while reading the letter she composed to her brother Babe for his 21<sup>st</sup> birthday. Even Paul Fussell, who dedicated his life to writing about the subject of war and memory, breaks down when recalling what it was like to confront the Holocaust for the first time.</p>
<p>Undoubtedly, there are many more such memories to be recorded: stories of violence and death and loss subsequently covered over with the thin veneer of civilization. If <em>The War </em>inspires a new generation to set out in search of these tales, it has done more than most films will ever do. Then again, those who go looking for stories of battlefield heroism and sacrifice may be surprised at what they find. During a trip to the beach this past summer, my 90-year-old father and I slipped into conversation about his Army years, spent in such exotic places as Colorado and California. He recalled, chuckling, that he wrangled his way out of a post as a drill instructor by offering up his accounting services to a beleaguered office manager on base. Now as then, he was perfectly happy to have had a desk job when so many men were fighting and dying overseas. He knew that combat was hell, he said, and he wanted no part of it.</p>Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:53:00 GMThttp://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/tv_week/2007/09/old_soldiers_never_lie.htmlBeverly Gage2007-09-20T19:53:00ZKen Burns' The War tells great stories, but is it great history?News and PoliticsKen Burns' The War reviewed.2174386Beverly GageTv Weekhttp://www.slate.com/id/2174386falsefalsefalseKen Burns' The War reviewed.Ken Burns' The War reviewed.The War